What Leaders Owe the People Who Follow Them

A note to young leaders.

Last Friday, the EG team went to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey at IMAX Darling Harbour.

Three hours of spectacle – but the scene that stayed with me, was one man standing alone on a beach.

Odysseus has devised a ruse that will end the Trojan War. The Greeks will appear to sail home, leaving behind a wooden horse as a gift. Soldiers will hide inside it – but someone must remain on the sand to sell the lie.

Odysseus chooses Sinon, his most loyal soldier. But he doesn’t tell Sinon about his plan. A man who knows nothing can divulge nothing, even under duress.

The ruse works. Sinon dies. Troy falls. Ten years of war end in a night.

Later, among the dead in Hades, Sinon confronts his commander: “Did you have to lie to me? I was a boy when I came with you to Troy. You knew I’d die for you.”

Odysseus does not apologise: “Dying men tell the truth. I needed you to believe.”

What makes the scene so good is that on strategy alone, you cannot fault Odysseus. If Sinon knew the truth, there was some chance, however small, that torture or terror would prise it out of him.

And yet Sinon would almost certainly have gone willingly. This was a man who had volunteered to take another man’s place in the draft, then given ten years of his life to the cause. Ask him to stand on the beach, and he stands on the beach.

But Odysseus did not ask. He preferred certainty to consent. That is the whole of the offence, and it’s committed in boardrooms more often than on beaches.

Defenders of Odysseus can fairly object: it is easy to moralise from the comfort of peacetime. Try standing with ten years of dead friends at your back and one ingenious ruse that might end it all.

Perhaps.

But something is lost, and it’s the very thing that made you worth following in the first place. Lose that and you can still win. Odysseus won. But it’s the kind of winning that lasts as long as you can avoid thinking about Sinon on the beach.

And a man who must forget his friends in order to live with himself is, as Odysseus learns among the shades, indistinguishable from the dead.