Napoleon's Glance: The Secret of Strategy

by William Duggan

In Napoleon's Glance William Duggan discovers the secret of Napoleon's success -- coup d'oeil (pronounced koo-DOY) meaning a stroke of the eye, or "glance": a sudden insight that shows you what course of action to take. It comes from knowledge of the You draw on what worked in other situations, in a new combination that fits the problem at hand. Napoleon's Glance -- probably the first book to link Napoleon's victories to Picasso's development as an artist! -- tells how 10 great strategists owed their success to coup d'oeil. All 10 applied it with great effort and risk and no guarantee it would work. But in case after case, we find the same How American women won the vote. How General Patton became the most successful Allied general on the Western Front of World War II. How Joan of Arc saved France from certain conquest by England. How in one generation Japan went from a peasant backwater to an industrial giant. How Picasso became the leading artist of the twentieth century. Though there have been scores of books written about Napoleon, this is the first popular book written for the general reader about his military strategy.

Genres: History, Business, Biography, Nonfiction, Business Strategy, Philosophy

300 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 23, 2003

Reviews

[Chelsea · Rating 2 out of 5]

The lesson is simplistic: the best strategies come from evaluating your current environment and building on what you know rather than trying to (unsuccessfully) mould the environment to something you know. It’s an important lesson, but forcing it into stories of historical figures gets tiring. They chosen historical figures are interesting, but this made me more interested in reading a good biography rather than these awkward essays trying to distill a simple lesson out of these rich lives.

Duggan actually says it best in the intro: “In telling these stories, this book might suffer from ‘confirmation bias’: That is, you find what you’re looking for and ignore everything else…To the charge of confirmation bias, we can only plead guilty. But the aim here is a modest one: only to show that…Napoleon’s glance is real.”

[Kumar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prof. Duggan has clearly made his career on this one key insight that human progress doesn’t happen because the protagonist sets a goal and works really hard to get it. It happens because the protagonist is in fact an opportunist who finds a path that works towards something meaningful by stealing from previous ideas (“stands on the shoulder of giants”) and setting it as his/her goal and resolves to achieve it. The four step process of Strategic Intuition is having presence of mind, coup d’oeil as creative recombination of past examples and resolution to go through with it. It was also great to read Prof. Duggan’s 10 examples from history particularly after his creative narration of these stories in class.

[Cory Steinberg · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was okay. I like the idea of "coup d'oeil" and very much see the utility in life (and business/leadership, which is my main reason for reading). However, the cases presented showing the example were inconsistent at best. While well researched, the cases and examples jumped around and throughout history too much. Without reading a full biography on some of these people, the examples just didn't resonate the majority of the time. The good news is that it did leave me wanting to read a few new biographies to really understand certain individuals! That bumped this from 2 stars to 3.

[Steven Leonard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the deepest and most illustrative discussion of coup d'oeil that I have ever read. Where Clausewitz breezed over the surface, Duggan dives in headfirst and never stops. This book was good enough to spur a discussion about considering it for mandatory reading in leadership courses.

[Melissa Johns · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this!!!

[Roderick Feltzer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easy to read, fascinating historical anecdotes regarding the concept of Napoleon’s Glance with emphasis on contrasting Strategy into two camps - planned and dynamic.

[Carrie]

A professor recommended this book to me. I recommend you take a different class.

[Fred Leland · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book goes along well with Duggan's "Strategic Intuition" both give great examples of real life people and circumstances who developed and used Clausewitz's coup d'oeil otherwise known as Napoleons glance, strike of the eye, and expert intuition and today recognized primed decision making. These examples give the reader insight into what intuition and implicit decision making is all about. The explorer mentality, searching for opportunities, combined with Napoleons glance (the ability to see the opening to exploit)can do wonders in enhancing real time decision making under pressure. The book will walk you through some history, explain coup d'oeil and give you ideas on how to develop it.

Here is a great quote from Patton to which a Chapter is focused on:

"...so thoroughly conversant with all sorts of military possibilities that whenever an occasion arises he has at hand without effort on his part a parallel. To attain this end I think it is necessary for a man to begin to read military history in its earliest form and to follow it down in natural sequence permitting his mind to grow with his subject until he can grasp without effort the most abstruce question of the science of war."

Very good book.

Fred

[Sean · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book defiles strategy as a discipline with its bosh. A series of disjointed narratives strung together only by the unifying theme of Napolean's ability to advance at times of strength and feed off of previous successes, this book omits much while repeating an insipid mantra relating to Napolean's eye. An insipid read, this book fails to inspire and excludes actual learning points from the field of strategy such as comparative advantage or game theory. Overall, a terrible book not worth wasting time on.