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I’ve been managing teams for a few years now. And at every seminar, every LinkedIn post, the same word keeps coming back: leadership. So overused that it barely means anything anymore.
So I read a book written by someone who actually commanded: General Pierre de Villiers, former Chief of the Defence Staff. “Qu’est-ce qu’un chef ? ” is the title. Straight to the point.
I expected a somewhat rigid military manual. I got a lesson in management instead.
And good news for those who’ve kept a bit of brain bandwidth available: it reads really well with your feet in the sand. The kind of book that’s perfect to slip into your beach bag this summer, between two thrillers.
Authority is not authoritarianism
De Villiers starts from Latin. Authority comes from “auctoritas”, which means to augment. The true leader is the one who makes his people grow, not the one who crushes them. We constantly confuse the two, and that’s precisely where modern management goes wrong.
His formula sums it all up: “A leader only exists through and for his subordinates. Making others succeed is succeeding.” The leader is at the service of those he commands, not the other way around. In companies, though, we often see the pattern reversed: the good numbers go up, the bad ones come back down.
The obedience of friendship
This is the concept that struck me the most. De Villiers distinguishes between the obedience of constraint, where you comply out of fear, and the obedience of friendship, where you buy in out of conviction and respect for your leader.
It can’t be decreed. It’s built with three ingredients: trust, meaning, and leading by example. You don’t command by PowerPoint. The manager who demands rigor but hands in his own stuff late gets spotted by everyone within two weeks. It’s the same fabric I was talking about in my tips for a serene life : the consistency between what we say and what we do.
True loyalty is telling the truth
Another line that hits home. Being loyal isn’t flattering your superior, it’s having the courage to tell him what’s uncomfortable.
He takes the example of Louvois, the army’s payroll system that turned into a fiasco. Budget decisions made from the top, without listening to the truths from the field. The kind of failure I recognize well in the software world: everyone saw the wall coming, no one dared tell the right level.
Technology at the service of humans, not the other way around
Here, I took the uppercut as an architect. No transformation, digital or organizational, succeeds if it forgets the people. The human factor isn’t an HR detail, it’s the condition for effectiveness.
He cites the relocation of the Ministry of Defence to Balard: it only worked because the technology stayed at the service of the leaders, and not the other way around. How many digital transformations crash for having done exactly the opposite? We deploy the tool, we pray that the humans adapt… it rarely ends well.
Decide, and flee the tyranny of immediacy
The leader must extract himself from what he calls the tyranny of immediacy. Stop putting out fires on a loop in order to regain a real capacity for anticipation. You never have all the information. Decide anyway, and own it.
On a day-to-day level, he’s refreshingly pragmatic. He fights against meeting overload: a meeting is for deciding, not for giving a status update. Subsidiarity: leave the initiative to the levels below. Field immersion: the leader gets out of his office to confront his intuitions with reality. Nothing revolutionary, but formidably healthy.
What I take away from it
The book doesn’t invent anything magical. It puts back in order some obvious truths we forget the moment we grab a title. Serving rather than serving yourself, telling the truth rather than flattering, carrying meaning rather than processes.
No five-step method to apply Monday morning. Just a guy who commanded tens of thousands of people and who sums up his conviction in one line: “There is no wealth but people.”
A good leader isn’t the one with the most power. It’s the one we trust to use it well.
If you’re tempted, the book is right here on Amazon . In paperback, it fits in your beach bag.
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