Clever Geek Handbook
26 December 2025

The Stirring of Soul in the Workplace

Recommendation

People need creativity, fantasy, passion and caring, argues Alan Briskin, and when they’re deprived of those things at work, there’s trouble ahead. Briskin’s book works well as a study in modern-day alienation. Tracing the loss of soul at work to scientific engineering, he summarizes various research findings that will seem like old college friends to those with business degrees. But the book sags when it sets forth into the land of the soul, where Briskin gets fuzzy, unfocused, repetitious and just plain hard to understand. In addition, he never actually gets around to telling us how to get soul back at work. Nevertheless, BooksInShort.com recommends this book to managers, employees and students with a desire to look deeper into the balance of hard work and personal satisfaction, and the patience to wade through the sometimes trite.

Take-Aways

  • Strive to incorporate the qualities associated with soul into the workplace.
  • These qualities include meaning, memory, beauty, fragility, divinity and union.
  • Try to synthesize the outer organization of work processes and managerial structures with the inner needs of people.
  • These inner needs include feelings, attitudes and a desire to connect.
  • Reconnect with your inner soul, which represents a multiplicity of selves.
  • When you explore your soul, recognize the dark side as well as the light.
  • The dark side of the soul consists of personal weaknesses and negative qualities.
  • Recognizing these unacknowledged dark-side qualities can be liberating for the individual and the organization.
  • The loss of soul in the workplace dates back to the industrial revolution and the scientific engineering principles developed by Frederick Taylor.
  • People need meaning even more today, because workplaces are more stressful and demanding.

Summary

The Need for Soul in the Workplace

There is a basic contradiction built into the modern workplace. The outer organization of work processes, which includes corporate objectives and managerial structures, works in opposition to the inner organization of people, which includes their emotions, attitudes, thoughts, and even the cooperative spirit the outer organization wants to foster.

“The demands of the workplace can be absolutely ruthless and crushing, while the dreams of the people in the same workplaces can be inspiring.”

To move into the future, organizations must straddle these two worlds and discover something new. This does not require using a particular program or technique, or embracing some strange, mystical belief system. Rather, it means that everyone should be more self-aware and more attentive to the voices of the inner soul, which are concerned with qualities like meaning, memory, beauty, fragility, divinity, wildness and union.

“To explore the challenge to the human soul in organizations is to build a bridge between the world of the personal, subjective, and even unconscious elements of individual experience and the world of organizations that demand rationality, efficiency, and personal sacrifice.”

To reconcile the human soul and the organization, build a bridge. On one side are the personal, subjective, and unconscious elements that make up the individual experience. On the other side are the organization’s demands for rationality, efficiency, and personal sacrifice. When the two sides fit together, you will feel a sense of harmony and balance. However, if no fit occurs, you will feel torn and alone. You will feel a conflict between your personal goals and needs, and those of the organization.

“When we are cut off from the deeper regions of soul, we lose the energies that give rise to the imagination and passions necessary for creativity and adaptation to a changing world.”

The reason for this split is that an underworld of the soul grows inside someone whose human needs aren’t satisfied. This underworld includes feelings of abandonment, rage, guilt, despair and shame. Anyone under great pressure and stress may feel these emotions, particularly those who sense a lack of balance in their lives. People who are cut off from the deeper regions of soul feel a loss of the strong internal energy that nourishes the imagination and passions necessary for creativity and adaptation to a changing world.

The Nature of Soul

You need to reconnect with your soul, which represents the multiplicity of selves that everyone has. Your soul is the mysterious, inner, multifaceted part of your personality. You can never know this part of yourself fully, but it is a vital, internal influence. To feel fulfilled, you should nurture and express it.

“The challenge of finding soul in organizations, as in life, is to embrace not only what we see, hear and understand, but also to attend to what we don’t know, what we cannot see at first glance or hear on first listening.”

For example, one top executive experienced a personal crisis when his company gave him a new assignment. During his review, the CEO told him that there were reports he wasn’t managing the transition very well and was losing control. As a result, he went through a deep period of soul-searching, in which he became more aware of himself and of personal weaknesses he had always concealed. He realized that he tended to be reactive to events and insecure about ambiguity. This personal journey and self-assessment was very liberating. He recognized darker features within himself that contradicted his conscious self, and he grew as a result.

“The soul represents the mysterious, multifaceted dimension of our personality, never fully known, yet a source of vital influence.”

You also can achieve greater personal growth and fulfillment by looking within yourself. This inner search will help you recognize your multifaceted soul beyond what you know consciously. You will find that seeing through and beyond your outer self helps you really know yourself and gives you insight about your workplace. Look at the full extent of your humanity, vitality, and understanding. Don’t look only at what you can see, hear, or understand initially, but examine what you discover when you observe and listen more deeply.

“The thread that is woven through the ancient ideas of the soul is that there are many selves whose interactions and struggles shape our thought and our consciousness in general.”

Now, you are going below the surface of reason to explore the unconscious wilderness of your feelings and emotions. This self-examination offers new possibilities for renewing and increasing your human potential.

The History of the Soul

Ideas about the soul rest on ancient wisdom. In early Greek writings, the soul is associated with the underworld. Ancient Greek and Hebrew stories associate the soul with vitality, animation, renewal and the essence of the human being. In both Taoist and Hebrew philosophy, the soul is associated with the union of opposites, where spirit and matter and the light and dark aspects of the human personality are combined. In Gnostic mythology, the soul is thought to include a spark of the divine and a bridge to the cosmic aspects of consciousness. In all of these traditions, the path to the soul is thought of as a journey of self-discovery.

“If we are to create organizational settings that are driven by values which recognize the dignity of employees and that are also socially responsible, then recognition of the shadow is a necessary reality check at both [the] personal and organizational levels.”

You can draw on this wisdom to recognize that many internal selves interact to influence your thoughts and consciousness. By being more aware of these many selves, you can become more comfortable with who you are and you can more effectively find meaning in your existence, including your work. An organization does better, too, when it comes to terms with its inner essence. Just as each person wrestles with essential questions of meaning and purpose, power and assertiveness, competence and inclusion, so does each organization, group, and society.

Learning from the Dark Side

As part of this self-analysis, recognize the dark side of your soul as well as the light. This dark side consists of personal weaknesses and negative qualities, such as the tendency to act with timidity, distorted perception and malice, in contrast to the light side qualities, such as the capacity to show courage, personal insight, and compassion.

“In each of us there is an allegiance to a light and a dark potential: the capacity for courage, personal insight, and compassion as well as the ability to act with timidity, distorted perception, and malice.”

You will find it liberating to acknowledge the dark-side qualities that might be holding you back. For example, one executive thought of himself as a collaborative leader. However, in reality, he was uncomfortable with negative emotional expressions and was strongly attached to his own beliefs. Thus, he wasn’t open to true collaboration, and couldn’t be, until he was ready to acknowledge these unrecognized emotions and take steps to change. Recognizing this dark side benefits the organization, too, since revealing these hidden dynamics helps create a greater sense of mutual connectedness.

How Organizations Started Suppressing the Soul

The loss of soul in the workplace dates back to the industrial revolution and the rise of scientific engineering developed by Frederick Taylor. Four key processes led to dramatic changes in the way individuals worked and lived: 1) the move from farm to factory; 2) the increase in wage labor; 3) the growth of cities; and 4) the great increase in immigration While these influences existed in the first half of the 1800s, they expanded rapidly from the 1850s through the first part of the twentieth century. These developments created a new dynamic between working and working for someone else. Before, people primarily had worked for themselves on farms and in villages.

“To include soul in our view of organizational behavior necessitates a recognition of its shadows. It also suggests being alert to the mythic patterns that repeat themselves time and again in the drama of organizational life.”

The development of clock time marked a significant change. Measured work time evolved in the early 1880s, because railroads needed a system of organized time. Time was standardized in 1883, which also marks the beginning of time zones. In 1910, Frederick Taylor pioneered the study of work processes and became the first proponent of "scientific management." He tried to show how the human body could work to increase efficiency. He emphasized breaking work down into tasks that could be done with precision, logic, and order. Taylor’s ideas spread rapidly, as managers tried to use his standards as a baseline for measuring efficiency. These concepts became the standard measurement of business performance.

The Difficulty of Finding Meaning at Work

These ideas on rationality and efficiency still influence business. They provided a rationale for work redesign and for exercising control over employees. They maintain their impact by separating work from the soul’s search for meaning and its desire for wholeness. Broken down into quantifiable increments, work has lost its internal coherence, the very element necessary to fulfill the soul’s desire to see things as part of a whole. Many modern catch phrases - "service excellence," "managing by walking around," and "continuous improvement" - ignore the individual’s essential need to find meaning in the task at hand.

“When in the grip of a collective shadow, we can tolerate only an idealized image of ourselves; we scapegoat someone or some group to reflect the parts that have been disowned.”

Unfortunately, when work becomes just a job, its intrinsic value disappears. You lose your feeling of purpose and connectedness. However, because the times are so turbulent, people need purpose and connectedness more than ever. You can’t get meaning from corporate mission statements. Achieving meaning requires dialogue and reflection, and the courage to ask difficult questions and face the consequences.

This effort to gain meaning is critical today, because organizations are asking for ever-higher levels of performance. People are asked to work near their melting points. Modern technology has quickened the pace, because it enables continuous work, from the phone in your car to the fax in your briefcase. Yet when you work too hard, your soul can experience great distress. This emerges in symptoms that are hard to repair, such as illness, social disorders, and personal suffering. Penalties for pushing yourself beyond your limits include feelings of exhaustion and a sense of falling from the heights of achievement, much as Icarus fell from the sky when he flew too close to the sun.

Beyond Human Relations

Current corporate human relations efforts seldom provide the meaning and connectedness the soul needs. Instead, most of these programs seem to manipulate individuals in the spirit of better scientific management. The roots of the human relations approach go back to Elton Mayor, who conducted experiments at Western Electric’s Hawthorne plant in Chicago. His results - which showed that human performance increased when managers paid attention to people and made them feel better about what they were doing - led to the human relations approach to managing feelings in the workplace in the 1950s.

However, this approach separated the worker’s feelings about work, supervision, and wages from the actual conditions of the work. It led to a split between human relations experts who managed feelings and technical experts who managed the conditions of the workplace. At the same time that the human relations people advocated personal development and democratic principles, the workplace became increasingly bureaucratic and mechanized.

The basic human relations model of motivation was based on the idea that an improved work environment would boost morale, resulting in higher productivity and more sustained performance. But this model left out soul, resulting in the feelings of tension and upset that many employees have today. A dangerous tension is growing between working for a salary and finding one’s passion, between working for others and fulfilling personal needs.

The ideal is a workplace that fuses personal meaning and corporate purpose. Employees need meaning and purpose. Help your employees balance their organizational roles with their personal lives, so they don’t have to split apart the outer and inner worlds of experience. People can accomplish this unity by taking a role that organizes behavior in relation to tasks and other people. This process of finding our voice is one way to synthesize the modern workplace’s competing demands. This internal synthesis of the roles you - and your employees - fulfill is essential for personal survival in a stressful workplace.

About the Author

Alan Briskin founded and owns Alan Briskin & Associates, an Oakland, California, organizational development consulting firm. He developed some of his ideas about organizational life when he worked with prison inmates and disturbed adolescents. His clients have included firms involved in many industries. He also consults with other management consultants about change, leadership and learning. He received his M.A. and Ph.D., in organizational psychology from the Wright Institute in Berkeley, California in 1984.

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The Stirring of Soul in the Workplace

Book The Stirring of Soul in the Workplace

Berrett-Koehler,
 


26 December 2025

Empowering Employees

Recommendation

At its best, Empowering Employees by Kenneth L. Murrell and Mimi Meredith illustrates the vogue concept of worker empowerment as it relates to real-life business, devoid of the touchy-feely clichés such nomenclature may evoke. The book cannot completely avoid a collapse into idealism and jargon however, and long sections of several chapters amount to cheery descriptions of the motivated and satisfied employees that empowerment will breed. These breezy passages fortunately are grounded by examples of companies like Toyota and AT&T that have embraced empowerment - or portions of it - to great success. So if employee-burnout is an issue in your office, or if you are looking for an easy-to-digest explanation of one of today’s most popular management trends, BooksInShort recommends this book to you.

Take-Aways

  • Empowering is about instilling and encouraging power in those around you.
  • Empowering managers believe that leadership comes from all employees.
  • Empowering managers share information with their employees, and include them in finding solutions, making plans and anything else that directly affects them.
  • Empowerment is not delegating work you hate to do.
  • Empowerment means shared responsibilities.
  • Communication is the core of empowerment.
  • Trust is essential in empowering relationships.
  • Servant-leaders want to serve and empower those they lead.
  • Servant-leaders take pride in what others accomplish.
  • "We-engineering," as opposed to re-engineering, includes employees in all plans for changing equipment, procedures and practices.

Summary

The Empowering Manager

In an article for Organizational Dynamics, Robert Quinn and Gretchen Spreitzer enumerated the common characteristics of empowered employees, no matter what their jobs or where they work:

  • Self-determination - The freedom to decide how to do their jobs.
  • A sense of meaning - Their work matters and they care about it.
  • A sense of competence - They’re able to do their jobs.
  • A sense of impact - They can make a difference and others will listen to them.
“During the final decade of the 20th century, empowerment became of the most frequently used words in management. Unfortunately, it also became one of the most misused concepts.”

In an empowering organization, managers and leaders believe that leadership comes from all employees, not just a few who run departments or have corporate titles. Since information is power, empowering managers share information with their employees. To empower, you must act. Empowerment is enabling the growth of individuals and organizations as they add value to the products or services the organization delivers to its customers. Empowerment also relies upon your managerial support of continuous learning and discovery.

“In an empowering organization, managers believe leadership derives from all its employees - not a select few.”

Empowering is not about hogging power for yourself. Empowering is:

  • The creative distribution of power.
  • Mutual influence.
  • Shared responsibility.
  • An inclusive, democratic and long-lasting process.
  • A way to enable people to use their talents and capabilities.
  • A way to foster accomplishment, invest in learning, build effective relationships, inform, lead, coach, serve, create and liberate.
“Although the electronic age promised us more leisure, it seems to have delivered less. Timesaving devices seem to result in time spending. Having information at our fingertips has evolved into information overload.”

Empowerment is not:

  • Proclaiming that you’re emancipating employees.
  • Delegating all the work you don’t want to do.
  • Something you do to or for someone else.
  • Making changes for the sake of change.
  • Creating teams so you can justify downsizing.
  • Leaving workers to fend for themselves.
  • Something that applies to "them" but not to "us."
“The spirit of your organization encompasses its mission and its vision - not necessarily the ones that are posted in the hallways, but the ones that are evidenced by its behaviors.”

Empowerment relies on the healthy, creative distribution of power, where the manager, facilitator, coach or leader changes, depending on the skills and talents a particular task requires. Empowerment means that workers and managers create their answers together, and that each individual adds power to the power of others, with the attitude that the amount of power in any organization is infinite. In a healthy, empowering system, shared responsibility boosts the flow of information and creates partnerships that relieve managers from solo decision making and troubleshooting.

“In an empowering organization, power becomes less about one person controlling another and more about the capacity within every person to create, develop and distribute power to accomplish individual and shared goals.”

For example, Toyota has a long corporate history of implementing employee suggestions from all levels of the company. Toyota’s system runs on constant improvement. An assistant manager at Toyota compared "an auto part whose design doesn’t get updated to a piece of fruit that doesn’t get refrigerated: they’re both rotten." This practice contributes to corporate and individual learning whether from mistakes, serendipity or flashes of genius.

Servant-Leadership

Communication is the key to empowering management. Dialogue, not debate, is the core of brainstorming, problem solving and on-going learning. Letting your employees know exactly what you need and asking them what they need is the cornerstone of empowered communication. Henry Tam, director of the Cambridge Centre for Citizenship Development, notes three obstacles that block empowerment - lack of commitment from the top, too little understanding of empowerment and staff silence (or lack of feedback). You should worry if your employees keep their ideas, opinions and feelings to themselves. Encourage them to communicate. Often employees keep silent out of fear, cynicism or apathy. Create an environment in which no one needs to be afraid to speak. Ask questions in a trusting way. If you behave as if you mistrust people, you will engender fear, frustration and paranoia among employees.

“Be suspicious of ’overnight cures.’ They’re tempting, but they just may lead you down an old road with a new name.”

Become a servant-leader, someone who offers resources when workers need them to perform their duties and when customers need them to be satisfied. Making these resources available increases innovation and helps your company stay competitive. Servant leaders understand that their role is to facilitate the success of those they lead - in other words to serve them. After all, no leader wants employees who are fearful, left out in the dark and frustrated because they have no opportunity to be creative. That mix does not lead to success for the leader or the company.

“Managers who act in ways that enhance empowerment contribute to building organizations that endure.”

AT&T’s Robert K. Greenleaf, who coined the term servant-leader, explains that servant leadership "begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead." The servant-leader makes sure that other people’s highest-priority needs are being served. This makes sense. People won’t follow a leader who isn’t concerned about them and their success. When you are a servant-leader, your employees:

  • Won’t wait for you to tell them what to do.
  • Will risk more, create more and trust more, because you support them.
  • Will support the organization’s values and mission by their words and actions, because you clarify and discuss those values with them and establish goals that bring the organization closer to achieving its mission.
  • Will feel valued, which will be reflected in their performance.
“Spirit comes from being able to answer these questions: ’Who are we?’ ’What do we believe?’ ’Why are we here?’”

As a servant-leader, your role is to see that empowering your employees results in products and services that delight customers and help the company grow. This requires that you act in ways that sustain your organization and the people working in it. To build sustainability:

  • Reward innovation and creation instead of damage control.
  • Promote ownership of the whole organization - not just your part of it.
  • Have more "fun to do" and less "have to do."
  • Aim for smaller but more frequent payoffs.
  • Find "the good life" inside the organization, not only in time away from work.
  • Take pride in what you and others accomplish within a certain amount of time, rather than complaining or bragging about how much overtime you work.
  • Create an organization that’s a healthy place for the people who work there -- healthy for their bodies, minds and souls.
  • Remember the "three R’s of Empowerment" - respect, resources and reinvestment.

Turning Re-Engineering into We-Engineering

The term re-engineering captured the imagination of leaders and managers throughout the ’90s. The term typically refers to revising business processes to adjust for rapid change. Often this process includes installing new or upgraded technology. The next time you think about re-engineering, consider "we-engineering" instead. When you engineer something, you design, construct and use it. Often, companies do that without taking into account how the changes will affect employees. If you don’t consider employees, they will feel the change has been thrown at them and they will resist it. They may even feel the change is intended to manipulate or intimidate them.

“Every manager finds empowering decision making a different experience.”

In we-engineering, you consciously, not accidentally or haphazardly, empower people. You design, construct and use technologies, organizational space, procedures and relationships in empowering ways, taking employees into account and including their feedback in both planning and implementation. No matter what changes you may be instituting, listen to the people who will be affected. They may be in a better position to help you design the most effective changes.

Participative Management

Traditionally, workforce-management relationships have been ’transactive,’ meaning that one bit of power is exchanged for another, or one level of performance is swapped for another. Empowering workforce-management relationships, however, are structured as ’transformative’ relationships in which power is created, responsibilities and creativity increase, and performance continuously improves. Begin with a transition phase, moving from individual goals, concerns and changes to organizational ones. This transition itself changes reporting relationships and team relationships, but you can create participative management in five steps:

  1. Use leadership skills that foster trust. Show your belief in employees and your mutual commitment to excellence. Trust them with significant, increasing responsibilities and jointly aim for successful performance.
  2. Build teamwork skills and valuing skills. Accept individual differences, encourage leadership skills and strengthen group commitment, communication and decision-making.
  3. Create strategic vision from the ground up. Involve all the stakeholders in this process, and support it.
  4. Ensure that your behavior and what you say are consistent. Don’t send mixed signals.
  5. Change the hierarchy to broaden employees’ control and freedom. Include employee input when planning, and create an inclusive, participatory, dynamic process.
“Become an empowering manager and invest in human capital.”

Create a comfortable office environment that’s conducive to creativity. Make everything safe and ergonomically supportive. Productivity will go up and disability claims will go down, as will time lost to illness. If you don’t know what ergonomics issues exist in your workplace, do some research and find out. Forget hard-backed chairs and other equipment no-no’s that can lead to muscle strain, repetitive motion problems, and other physical ramifications.

Employee Magic

When you empower your employees, magic happens - people end up loving their jobs. In turn, this attitude creates a productive, competitive, successful company, with a great reduction in burnout. What makes employees hate their jobs or burn out?

  • Boredom and not having enough work to do.
  • Overwork, lack of respect, and a dearth of creative outlets.
  • Poor relationships at the office.
  • Uncomfortable working conditions.
  • Not being told exactly what’s expected.
  • Office politics.
  • Management inconsistency.

The journey to empowerment is never finished; it’s a constant and rewarding process that leads to more and more success.

About the Authors

Ken Murrell , professor of Management and Management Information Systems at the University of West Florida, is an international consultant, a community activist and empowerment pioneer. He’s worked with the World Bank, the U.N. Development Program, the U.S.I.A., and firms of all sizes including Motorola, Pfizer, BellSouth and Toyota. He taught around the globe, and consulted in Asia, Africa, South America and the Middle East. Mimi Meredith owns Wordsmiths Unlimited, where she writes, edits and designs public relations materials, training manuals and books. She has a master’s degree in computer science, worked as a social worker and a trainer, and spent five years as research associate at the University of West Florida’s Educational Research and Development Center.

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Empowering Employees

Book Empowering Employees

McGraw-Hill,
 


26 December 2025

The Soul of Battle

Recommendation

While Napoleon declared that God favors the side with the most battalions, author Victor Davis Hanson suggests otherwise. Hanson reasons that the side marching to preserve a great moral cause - e.g., the defense of individual freedoms against the agents of human oppression - possesses the true soul of battle. Seen in this light, war becomes far more than a duel of logistics, technology and strategy. Hanson believes that victory’s first seeds are sown in the human spirit, and the terrible battlefield harvest is collected later. He provides three historic examples: Theban general Epaminondas’ destruction of Sparta, Union General William Sherman’s march through Georgia and U.S. General George Patton’s demolition of the Third Reich. In this well researched and almost poetically written volume, Hanson reveals the basis of democratic countries’ military dominance. BooksInShort.com recommends this book to military professionals, students of military history and those who seek a deeper understanding of the strength of democratic societies.

Take-Aways

  • Successful military operations depend not on tactics, weaponry or training - but on the spirit that motivates the soldier.
  • When threatened, democratic societies have demonstrated the ability to rouse citizen-soldiers to their defense.
  • A totalitarian regime’s forces are often hollow.
  • Great commanders such as Epaminondas, William Sherman and George Patton inspire troops with the vision of a greater moral cause.
  • These leaders were misfits in peacetime but thrived in command.
  • The leader of a democratic force must motivate soldiers to overcome their deep-seated moral reluctance to slaughter. Patton mastered this challenge.
  • Epaminondas’ victory over Sparta changed the course of Grecian history.
  • Although Sherman is remembered as cold and heartless, he preserved his men’s lives and liberated thousands of slaves.
  • Patton believed victory lay in pushing his armored columns relentlessly forward.
  • Patton scorned the idea of slowing down to consolidate territory and protect his flanks.

Summary

In Defense of Democracy

Writer D.H. Lawrence described Americans as "natural-born killers." The outcomes of the major 20th-century conflicts seem to support him, but they reflect a democratic phenomenon, not an American one. Armies defending democratic peoples have repeatedly demonstrated their ability to impose horrific levels of military violence when threatened, perhaps because they nurture a moral cause that provides the soul of battle. Consider three examples: Theban general Epaminondas destroyed Spartan hegemony. Union army General William Sherman liberated more than 50,000 slaves. General George Patton demolished the Third Reich. These leaders from different eras shared several common characteristics:

  • Each followed an arcane code of honor and was unsuited for peace.
  • Each was a closet intellectual, widely read in literature and in the scholarship of war.
  • Each put his life in danger by stalking along on the front lines to encourage his men.
  • Each transformed armies of peace-loving amateurs into effective fighting forces of deadly precision, ultimately more dangerous than the armies of militaristic societies.
  • Each proved that armies of democratic societies, while unorthodox in their use of mobility and logistics, could succeed despite nay-saying conventional wisdom. Their armies dispersed as quickly as they formed, once need for the soul of battle had passed.

Epaminondas on the Dance Floor of War

You can visit nearly every significant battlefield in Greece in a single afternoon: Plataea, Tanagra, Oinophyta, Coronea, Delium, Haliartus, Tegyra and Chaeronea. However, visitors rarely come to arguably the most important battlefield of all, a single spot in the middle of a grain field. Here, in Leuctra, in the Greek region of Boeotia, a stark, white marble column commemorates the day in 371 when the general Epaminondas and his army from Thebes demolished Sparta’s elite warriors. The monument marks the spot where Epaminondas irreversibly altered Grecian history by finally defeating the great army of Sparta.

“What, then, is the soul of battle? A rare thing indeed that arises only when free men march unabashedly toward the heartland of their enemy in hopes of saving the doomed, when their vast armies are aimed at salvation and liberation, not conquest and enslavement.”

In Greek, Boeotia translates literally as "cow pastures," so the Thebes of Boeotia rising up to throw off Spartan aggression was the equivalent, for instance, of the dairy farmers of Iowa marching on Manhattan. Flat, accessible Boeotia was such a popular battlefield that Epaminondas called it "the dancing floor of war." Sparta’s famed warriors, who were used to enslave hundreds of thousands of people, dominated that bloodstained plain for centuries, but the Boeotians gradually nurtured a soul of battle that led them to victory.

“These marchers of a season must be led by ruthless and gifted men who are often of little use in a peacetime democracy but find their proper authoritarian and aristocratic calling only as absolute rulers of an armed citizenry.”

Unlike Grecian and Spartan societies, the democratic Boeotian union was comprised of people who did not need to own property to be full citizens. To the Greeks, land was everything, and men without land neither voted nor fought. The Boeotians followed a radical practice: wealthy horseman voluntarily shared power with average farmers and the poor. This increased national unity and added to the number of men available to be soldiers. Sparta underestimated the importance of heavy infantry, which tended to draw men from the less wealthy classes. In Boeotia, strategy - not social class - determined the order of battle.

“Epaminondas, not King Philip, not Divine Alexander, not wild-eyed Pyrrhus and not one-eyed Hannibal, who all led hired thugs, was the real modern military thinker of the ancient world.”

Sparta made the blunder of motivating their enemy’s soul, by seizing control of the sacred Cadmea, the spiritual and political center of Thebes. Over the years, the Thebians developed a near fanatical hatred of the Spartans. Using these advantages, Thebes routed the Spartans on the plains of Leuctra in 371. But that wasn’t enough. Epaminondas insisted that Thebes press its advantage and actually invade Sparta to carry the war to the enemy. Using a modified phalanx - giving his army more depth but a potentially exposed flank - he destroyed the Spartans and freed Sparta’s Messenian slaves. Sparta never regained its hegemony. Roman orator Cicero proclaimed Epaminondas, "The First Man of Greece," the general whose small, determined army felled an empire built on slavery.

Sherman and the Army of the West

In 1864, the northern states’ victory in the U.S. Civil War was far from certain. If the southern Confederacy fought well enough to force a stalemate, its "peculiar institution" - slavery - would continue. President Abraham Lincoln understood that this put the burden on the North. His Army of the Potomac advanced the cause fitfully, as southern Generals Robert E. Lee and "Stonewall" Jackson kept the North off balance with a series of skillful campaigns.

“Even in the modern age of industry and technology, George Patton was convinced that victory still hinged upon the warrior soul of his army. Spirit could prompt soldiers to accomplish things far beyond their apparent material limitations; in turn, the absence of audacity might allow well-equipped and plentiful troops simply to quit in dejection.”

Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s invasion of Atlanta and his subsequent March to the Sea were designed to bring the cruel facts of war home to the southern plantations. Though Southerners spoke of fighting to defend their way of life and hold onto their property, Sherman believed the North was truly defending noble ideals, including liberation of the slaves. As one of his soldiers wrote, "The more I learn of the cursed institution of slavery, the more I feel willing to endure, for its final destruction."

“Democracies for a season can produce the most murderous armies from the most unlikely of men, and do so in the pursuit of something spiritual rather than the mere material.”

Sherman described his march as "piercing a hollow shell," because he met less resistance than expected. Sherman, who was vilified by generations of Southerners, explained, "Those people made war on us, defied and dared us to come south to their country, where they boasted they would kill us and do all manner of horrible things. We accepted their challenge, and now for them to whine and complain of the natural and necessary results is beneath contempt." Sherman expelled Atlanta’s civilians after his troops took the city on September 2, 1864. When he left on November 16 to begin his march of destruction, he ordered his troops to set fire to shops and warehouses that had supported the war effort. Without a citizenry to contain the inferno, Atlanta was virtually destroyed. Sherman’s army marched southeast, away from the towering columns of dark smoke, but their fate was terribly uncertain.

“We military historians, if we claim a morality in our dark draft, must always ask not merely what armies do, but rather what they are for.”

The Union had sent 1,000 railcars of supplies to Atlanta to keep its troops from starving, yet with the approval of his superiors, Sherman now cut himself loose from his supply lines and raced through hostile territory. Once his troops reached coastal Savannah, the Union’s dominant Navy could provision them. But, meanwhile, the North’s hungry men descended on the Georgia heartland, leaving only desolation behind them. Sherman took tremendous risks, knowing that when Lee’s soldiers - still stationed to the north - learned that his troops were burning their farms, the news would devastate morale.

“It is a dangerous and foolhardy thing for a slaveholding society to arouse a democracy of such men.”

Because any substantial delay caused by battle could destroy an army that had severed its own supply lines, several of Lincoln’s advisers believed Sherman’s march was reckless, the product of an unstable mind. Yet, Sherman’s tactics were straightforward, and included avoiding a direct assault on enemy forces wherever possible. Sherman was able to transmit his ideological fervor throughout his army, and freed of logistical concerns, his 62,000 men moved unpredictably through the countryside, foraging and pillaging in a great swath, and still traveling 10 to 15 miles a day toward Savannah. In part due to these logistics, Sherman divided his army into a left and right wing. Each wing further subdivided itself. To keep the army alive, teams of foragers spread out six or seven miles. Consequently, in some places the path of devastation spanned as much as 60 miles with a simple mission: consume and destroy.

“Modern historians publish endlessly on the eminence of Alexander the Great, the greatest thug that the ancient world produced, a man who in his sheer propensity for killing the innocent - over a million were to die in his swath to the Indus - was a kindred spirit to Hitler.”

In retrospect, only a scorched-earth retreat that left nothing behind to eat could have stopped Sherman’s march. Several Confederate leaders urged just such a tactic, but the campaign failed because the plantation class, which defined life in material rather than human terms, was naturally disinclined to lay waste to the very thing they were trying to protect. So Sherman’s men marched on, devastating farms, liberating slaves and shooting every dog that crossed their path - because hounds had been used to hunt down runaway slaves and capture escaping Union prisoners. Sherman’s egalitarian army (90% of his lieutenants had been enlisted men) was receptive to the cause of liberating slaves, and pursued it with zeal. Sherman reached Savannah on December 10, his army having suffered only about 100 casualties during its month-long march through enemy territory. He telegraphed Lincoln, "I BEG TO PRESENT YOU AS A CHRISTMAS GIFT, THE CITY OF SAVANNAH."

“Epaminondas had the keen, almost uncanny ability, shared with both Sherman and Patton, to sense that the interior of a slave society is not strong, but weak.”

Later, Sherman turned north and marched to Washington, D.C. Although excoriated for brutality, he probably saved thousands of lives by bringing the war to an earlier end. History views Lee - who wrecked his army by mounting frontal assaults on an entrenched enemy - as the reluctant knight fighting loyally to defend his homeland. Sherman, who preserved his soldiers and liberated tens of thousands of slaves, is often seen as a murderous, heartless general. Yet Sherman is the one who inspired his troops with the soul of battle.

Patton and the Third Army

General George Patton’s writings make one obsession evident: speed. To survive in war-torn Europe, his men must move forward constantly and kill on the run. Patton scorned the idea of slowing down to consolidate territory and protect his flanks. The night before his army became operational in Europe in July, 1944, Patton told his troops, "Flanks are something for the enemy to worry about, not us. I don’t want to get any messages saying that, ’We are holding our position.’ We’re not holding anything. Let the Hun do that. We are advancing constantly and we’re not interested in holding on to anything except the enemy. We’re going to hold on to him by the nose and we’re going to kick him in the ass." He believed his blitzkrieg through Germany’s viscera would hasten the war’s end and, ultimately, save lives. Along the way, he would liberate those who had struggled against Nazi oppression.

“When the war ended, George Patton was commander in the field of the largest single American army in the nation’s history. In contrast, the Third Reich was a shell, and with the arrival of Patton’s armor the entire hollow society collapsed.”

Patton’s path was tortured. He faced frustrating immobility in October 1944. His supply lines were stretched too thin across Europe. When Patton’s tanks ground to a halt, the German’s were able to muster a credible defense at Metz in the Lorraine region. Then, just as Patton was about to crack the German resistance, General Bradley moved him, sending Patton to relieve elements of the First Army in the Battle of the Bulge. After he helped demolish the German counteroffensive, Patton’s official orders were to engage the Germans in the south, while Montgomery resumed a plodding attack in the north. By February 1945, the Third Army faced the longest trek and worst terrain of any Allied army in Germany. Patton intended to send fast-moving armored columns around German strong points and destroy German morale by attacking from the rear, while also saving lives that would be lost in a head-on assault. He personally exhorted troops at the front, racing about in an open car, his face blistered, as his aides huddled behind him to escape the cold.

“Patton proved that the idea of a great democratic march, an ideological trek in which a fiery commander might pour his spirit of vengeance into his citizen soldiers, was not lost, regardless of the sheer magnitude and deadliness of such an undertaking in the murderous new age of mechanized warfare.”

In March, more than 80,000 Germans surrendered in four days. The Seventh and First German Armies vanished. On March 23, after his engineers ferried thousands of GIs onto German soil, Patton urinated in the Rhine, hopped into his Jeep and headed east. Under questioning, captured German officers confessed that Patton was their greatest fear. Where would he attack next? What were his tactics? How fast was he moving, and to where?

“Patton’s army was thus to be foremost an ideological one, whose brutal fighting was to serve a higher moral purpose.”

On April 25, the Third Army reached Czechoslovakia. Patton was shocked as Eisenhower halted his advance, allowing Russian armies to occupy the Czech capital. An army of 500,000 American men watched as the Russians took over the country, based on diplomatic agreements that Bradley feared would cause complications. "For God’s sake, Brad," Patton countered, "...America should let others worry about complications." Patton urged Eisenhower to let his tanks lumber into Berlin. When Eisenhower retorted, "Well, who would want it?" Patton replied, "I think history will answer that for you."

About the Author

The son of a U.S. Army Air Corps Sergeant who served under General LeMay in the devastating firebombing of Japan, author Victor Davis Hanson is a professor of classics at California State University in Fresno. He has written or edited several books, and is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Military History Quarterly. He and his family live in Selma, California, on the family farm where he was born.

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The Soul of Battle

Book The Soul of Battle

From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny

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