An Unexpected Learner: Genghis Khan’s Obsession With Continuous Learning
Genghis Khan? Wasn’t he the barbarian who killed millions!
This is generally a response if asked who is Genghis Khan? However, his personality & leadership qualities of resilience, agility & adaptability can be revisited in the fast-changing, uncertain world that is the VUCA today. Like Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs, Genghis Khan was also a disrupter. He did not operate in the VUCA environment. He created VUCA.
The Genius of warfare was not bred in one day. Inspiring followers on trustworthiness, capitalized upon unlimited skills, which is worth understanding. Do you think these unprecedented skill sets came on account of an enlightenment? Or were these an extension of continuous learning, adaptation with experimentation followed by enriching it with revision with a unique set of discipline and focused mindset?
Genghis Khan’s fighting career began at the age of 11 when his father, a Mongol tribal chief, was assassinated and Genghis’s family was banished from his tribe. In each struggle with resilience and new ideas, he altered military tactics, strategies and weapons. Being resilient is what we can draw, undergoing the Covid-19 pandemic. Without hunt for survival there is neither agility nor adaptability.
A small family without tribal affiliation, he had little chance of survival. In a hostile environment one can be raided and enslaved by any marauding group on the move. This happened to him too, in a raid was captured and slaved for several years. He found an opportunity, escaped and re-joined his family. The careful planning, the self-control, the understanding of people, the awareness of his powers over others and young people in particular, the lack of impulsiveness were all acquired qualities he deployed in his escape. Later, these qualities were capitalised upon in his journey. Fate did not hand Genghis Khan his destiny; he made it for himself. All these learning were put into action when Genghis was building his army. Ultimately he united all Mongol tribes and laid the foundation of a State.
His innovative ideas did not emanate from a divine intervention or deluge as an inspiration but grew out of a life-long habit of learning from every event whether success or failure and every person, friend or foe, he encountered. He exhibited resilience, agility and adaptability to the fullest, traits which are essential for career growth in this fast-changing uncertain world. Washington Post named him their Man of The Millennium, ahead of Columbus and Alexander the Great.
As he gained new territory and came in touch with established states, Genghis Khan started making changes in governance. He learnt governance from captured Turks, Chinese & others devising stable system contributing to an orderly government.
The average Mongol tribe numbered one hundred to three hundred warriors. When Genghis started unifying the tribes, his army gradually increased to thousands and ultimately about 200,000 with his empire becoming four times than that of Alexander the Great. He had scanty thoughts on how to manage a large army with no one to mentor him. Thus compelling him to learn the basic field tactics like encircling, feigning retreat, signalling system etc. through experimentation and trial & error. He was harsh on individuals not submitting to the discipline of transforming from a horde to an army. Genghis Khan, with only the insights of his experiences, transformed his hordes into a modern disciplined and trained army.
Part of Genghis Khan’s great success was his proclivity towards pragmatic principles. If it worked, Genghis Khan had no reluctance to part with tradition and adopt a better strategy, whether it was his own creation or an established practice of another nation. Many of his best generals and field commanders came from conquered nations. As Genghis conquered more territory, he came in contact with the bureaucracy and intelligentsia of the conquered nations, especially Chinese, who had developed the systems required to run a large empire. He unabashedly used any new method or scheme, which he found useful to run his growing empire, often overruling his own people.
He learnt how to conduct siege of fortified cities. Genghis with his army lived and fought on open grasslands and he had no experience of laying siege to and conquering forts. Till he reached the walls of the Chinese cities, Genghis had never seen a stone building. Genghis Khan had to invent his own methods. He developed many tactics including cutting supply lines and diverting rivers and operating his newly acquired Chinese siege engines. Not all experiments succeeded but lessons were learnt. When he attacked the fortified city of Tangut, he used one unorthodox method to diverting a channel of the Yellow River to flood it. With their inexperience in hydraulics, the Mongols succeeded in diverting the river, but it wiped out their own camp instead of the enemy’s. In future, the Mongols would use this method again, adapting each time more successfully. Ultimately, he perfected siege warfare to such a degree that he ended the era of walled cities.
His pursuit of lifelong learning comes out clearly through his efforts to teach his sons. What is surprising that unlike most conquerors who had come before him and followed him, he displayed a keen sense of self awareness. He tried to teach them that the first key to leadership was self-control, particularly the mastery of pride, which was something more difficult, he explained, than to subdue a wild lion, and anger, which was more difficult to defeat than the greatest wrestler. He warned them that “if you can’t swallow your pride, you can’t lead.” He admonished them never to think of themselves as the strongest or smartest and keep the welfare of your people above yours.
Genghis lived a simple life and warned his son about the folly of pursuing a life of luxury with fine clothes, fast horses and women. This is a sure way of straying from your vision, losing everything you have achieved. In one of his most important lessons, he told his sons that conquering an army is not the same as conquering a nation. You may conquer an army with superior tactics and men, but you can conquer a nation only by conquering the hearts of the people.
Ultimately, Genghis Khan demonstrated that leadership has no connect with birth or is an innate quality but one which can be learnt and perfected through diligent development, study, and application. Genghis Khan, like every individual, would have encountered different learning experiences through continuous engagement and pursuit of purpose. The learning and art of knowledge transfer may follow formal or informal, theoretical or experiential route but what is central to the subject is that learning must be continuous. These are the skills of an agile and resilient leader.
Note-Copyright permission has been granted by Professor Jack Weatherford to quote from his book Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
