Alexander the Scalable: What the world’s most successful general can teach us about running a start-up

Alexander and Elon ride into battle (photo credits here and here)

Alexander the Great is hard to ignore. With a relatively small army, he swept across the Middle East from Greece to India in the 4th Century BCE and built one of the largest kingdoms in history at the tip of a spear. He was also vicious and violent, and as modern historians who are not beholden to traditional pro-Western sugar coating look more closely at his life, he comes off as callous at best and bloodthirsty at worst. But set aside the murderous rampage part for a moment, and it’s hard to ignore that on a practical level, Alexander has a thing or two to teach us about running a growing organization.

As a student of ancient history turned start-up cofounder, I have a weakness for nerdy metaphors that somehow connect cavalry charges to management theory. In an attempt to spare my real-life colleagues, I thought I'd share them with you. Hold on to your steed and sharpen your spear—it’s time to extract business intelligence from the dusty battlefields of the ancient world.

Strategically, be bold.

If anyone ever tried to make a dent in the universe, it was Alexander of Macedonia. To really understand this, you have to appreciate the sheer ratio of the land he conquered to the one he started with—one of the largest such ratios in the history of expansionist states. The map below is a good place to start. Alexander inherited the throne of Macedonia and some conquered Greek states from his father. For centuries, Greece has been a loose coalition of quarreling city-states with a surprising penchant for narrowly fending off attacks from the massive and opulent Persian Empire to the East. As far as the Persians were concerned, Greece was a tiny fly to be swatted, and Macedonia was its backwater. Within a generation, Alexander’s father annexed Greece, and Alexander went on to take over the better part of a continent. Through a series of important battles ranging from river-crossing slugfests to desert set-pieces to high-stakes city assaults, Alexander won this territory by systematically picking apart the empire of the Persian king Darius.

Alexander used a mid-sized Greco-Macedonian army to conquer everything from Athens to the Indus (photo credit here).

At least, that’s the story you always hear. All the hour-long History Channel documentaries are unanimous—Alexander was a wily genius whose life was full of exciting cavalry charges and flawless maneuvers. Historians and popular culture focus on the big, epic clashes. But nobody talks about the battles that Alexander did not fight. You hear about the Battle of Issus where Alexander’s men forded a river and plunged headlong into the enemy, crushing them despite the muddy uphill climb. Or maybe the Battle of Gaugamela—made popular by the otherwise terrible movie Alexander—in which he slaughtered a Persian force that outnumbered his own by as much as 4-to-1 in the open deserts of the Middle East while losing only a tiny fraction of his men. Or the Battle of the Hydaspes in India, where the Macedonians thwarted a great Indian king by taking on his terrifying war elephants tusk-to-spear.

But this paints the wrong picture of the man. Our modern eye sees him as a genius leader who could destroy any foe he opposed—a brilliant, vicious savant who fought battles with reckless cunning, the same way Einstein stuck out his tongue at centuries-old tenets of physics on a hunch, or the way Hemmingway wove run-ons into a narrative tapestry that would make grammarians cringe. But as usual, that’s not the whole story. Not even the important part.

Tactically, be conservative and precise.

For every battle Alexander fought, he pulled back from a dozen. What they don’t tell you about the Battle at Issus, for example, is that things only came to blows after painstaking jockeying for position—feints and counterfeints, carefully planned supply chain raids, and daily analysis and adjustment. For months, the armies Alexander and King Darius danced across the deserts of what is now Turkey, only clashing when conditions were optimal for the Macedonians. At the Battle on the Hydaspes, Alexander didn’t charge headlong into the enemy war elephants the first time he saw them. He used the cover of darkness and forest (quite a feat for goatherds-turned-spearmen thousands of miles from the rocky hills of home) to march men back and forth along the river, making as much noise as they could. Day-after-day, the Indians were forced to respond to false alarms, before suffering a deadly case of “boy who cried wolf” when the veteran Macedonians finally did come pouring across the river.

Don’t go anywhere near Alexander (2004), an unintentional comedy starring Colin Farrell, Angelina Jolie, and (inexplicably) Val Kilmer.

Alexander might have been a genius, but not for the reasons you think. It’s not that Alexander was incapable of losing; he was just too good at maximizing winnable battles and minimizing bad ones. Alexander was a statistician with a spear and sandals, and he knew how to play the odds.

In battle, believe it or not, Alexander played by the rules. He’s almost boring to look at compared to the chaotic genius of Napolean's massed artillery or the thunderous lightning-warfare of Rommel. Just like those pesky football teams in high school who always run the same play for a 15 yard gain that your defense just can’t seem to crack, Alexander rarely diverged from his successful formula. Alexander’s father had revolutionized the Macedonian army into an elite force with sturdy pike-wielding infantry to pin the enemy in place (like an anvil) and powerful cavalry to drive into their flanks (like a hammer). The system wasn’t broken, so Alexander didn’t fix it. He used the same familiar tools every time; his brilliance was in how and when he deployed them.

Trading spears for spreadsheets...

I try to run my piece of SparkFund like Alexander ran his battles. First and foremost, you must be confident in your vision. Your team must be 100% convinced that the overall goals you set—the market you plan to disrupt, the technology you plan to deploy, the social mission you plan to fulfill—are worthy, aggressive, and attainable. Why? Because if you do your job right, the overall mission will be the last thing on their mind on a day-to-day basis. Alexander didn’t begin his battles by pointing to the East and declaring the next five cities to fall. He told his men to watch their corners, stay in formation, stab hard, and do everything in their power to stay alive. He was a student of long-term planning, but equally so of the grind of battle. Trading spears for spreadsheets, the same logic applies. Flawless day-to-day execution and a love of detail is the single most important factor in realizing your company’s vision. Don’t just encourage your team to think of little details as a means to the end; inspire them to take pride in execution itself. Fall in love with the practical. Big ideas can get soldiers to the battle, but only precision and tenacity can see them through to the next one.

Most importantly, I try to pick my battles just like Alexander—by avoiding 90% of them. Running a start-up is an exercise in being behind on everything all the time; the artistry is in being less behind on the right things. I am convinced that the greatest generals and executives alike are defined more by what they don’t do than by what they do. The first iPhones and iPods were a success largely because of the features they omitted. Facebook made a name for itself precisely by not being a messy, unregulated cesspool of teenage angst and questionable music like that other social network. The difference between “can” and “should” is the breeding ground of success. In every enterprise of which I’ve been a part, the right formula has three parts: set a vision, determine the smallest possible set of activities that will realize that vision, and then execute flawlessly on those activities. Fight the battles you can win, and don’t be ashamed of an orderly withdrawl from those you can’t.

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Joe Indvik is Co-Founder, President, & COO of SparkFund, an energy efficiency finance company that has developed a flexible financing solution specifically designed for small & medium sized projects. The company launched in February 2014 and has grown rapidly to a team of 12. Joe majored in Economics and minored in Ancient History at Dartmouth College, so take this with many grains of salt.