How to influence men : the use of psychology in business / by Edgar James Swift.

  • Swift, Edgar James, 1860-1932.
Date:
1927
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: How to influence men : the use of psychology in business / by Edgar James Swift. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    strange tactics meant an attack on the centre in a column [the French commander saw], as he says, the possibility of cutting off Nelson’s rearmost ships. ... It was a risk Nelson had calculated and taken with a light heart. ‘It must be some time,’ he wrote in the memorandum, ‘before they can perform a manoeuvre to make their force suf- ficiently compact to attack any part of the British fleet.’ ” ^ And so it proved. Stonewall Jackson, again, comes well within the require- ments of a leader mentioned by a recent writer in the Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute. “A man without dash,” says this writer, “is never a hero to his fel- low men, and one without imagination cannot hope to rise above mediocrity.” ^ Yet Jackson, though he met this requirement, never dashed without knowledge. “Before he committed him- self to movement he deliberated long, and he never broke camp until he had ample information. . . . His power of drawing inferences, often from seemingly unimportant trifles, was akin to that of the hunter in his native back- woods, to whom the rustle of a twig, the note of a bird, a track upon the sand, speak more clearly than written characters. . . . After the bloody repulse at Malvern Hill, when his generals awakened him to report the terrible confusion in the Confederate ranks, he simply stated his opinion that the enemy was retreating, and went to sleep again. A week later he suggested that the whole army should move against Pope, for McClellan, he said, would never dare march on Richmond. ... At Fredericksburg, after the first day’s battle, he believed that the enemy was already defeated, and, anticipating their escape under cover of the darkness, he advised a night attack with the bayonet. His knowledge of his adversary’s character, de- 1 Ibid., pp. 389-390. 2 Captain R. D. White, Proceedings of the U. S. Naval Institute, vol. 47, P- 655-