Lately, I changed my view of fiction literature from a somewhat time-wasting entertainment to a rather efficient form of teaching. I think the usefulness of fiction stems from human ability to relate to good stories. Perhaps, our liking of storytelling is a result of evolutionary adaptation to quickly and widely spreading information within the society in the most efficient way – a way that employs our capacity to relate to emotional content. We like a good story, and a good story can teach us, in an implicit way, something that would take libraries-full of scientific literature to describe analytically, i.e. by defining every term, concept and rule.
I believe that this scene, which took Tolstoy a couple of pages to describe, might be worth a couple of shelves of modern non-fiction books in a bookstore’s “Leadership”. This battle scene is a succinct description, through an example, of a fairly complicated leadership principle, rooted in stoicism (another fashionable non-fiction area these days): faced with the circumstances that were beyond his control, Bagration did not let them alter his way of relating to his men.
I am sure that this leadership approach can be very effective in the far less dramatic circumstances of everyday lives of most people (in the first-world countries, anyway). From coaching a kendo team to leading a research group to directing models during a photoshoot – projecting confidence and remaining calm is undoubtedly a useful skill.
