Leadership Lessons in the Rain

Alexander at the Hyphasis, 326 BCE - the finest motivational talk in antiquity, and why it bounced Alexander the Great never lost a battle. He lost exactly one argument, to exhausted men standing in the rain, and the speech he gave to win that argument remains, twenty-three centuries later, the most complete syllabus of leadership rhetoric ever compressed into a single address. Every trope is present. The vision. The sacrifice. The legacy. The open door. It is magnificent, it is sincere, and it failed completely, which is precisely why it may be the most instructive leadership speech ever given. The lesson is simply not the one the speaker intended. The room he walked intoPicture the scene. Eight years of campaigning and thousands of miles on foot, from Macedonia through Anatolia, Egypt, Persia, and Bactria, down into the Punjab. Behind the army lies everything with a name worth conquering. Ahead lies the Hyphasis river, swollen by a monsoon that, by Diodorus's count, has been falling…