Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - The French Knight’s Guide to Corporate Culture

Episode Date: June 17, 2022

France 1346: The army of King Philip VI is Europe's pre-eminent killing machine. It's accustomed to crushing any force stupid enough to oppose it, and now fully expects to annihilate a motley band of English invaders in a field near the village of Crecy.    Except as night falls, it is Philip's army that lies broken and bleeding in the mud. What went wrong? The French knights, it seems, had failed to update their corporate culture.    For a full list of sources go to timharford.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin On the north bank of the estuary were assembled the English Army. A little over 2,000 knights supported by 5,000 archers. On the south bank, the larger force of the French, 8,000 knights and thousands of crossbowmen alongside them. The French army had been chasing the English for weeks, but wisely decided not to try to cross the salty marshes within range of those English archers. Instead, between the opposing armies, a single French knight, like a hero from Arthurian legend, galloped out towards the English,

a tiny figure in the middle of the tidal flats. He shouted out his challenge. Following the traditions of courtly love, the French knight was carrying the token of some fair lady, and wanted to prove that he was worthy of her. Did any Englishman dare thrice to joust with him in full view of both armies? There was a moment of silence, broken only by the flapping of the penance in the sea breeze. And then, an English knight roared out his acceptance. The two men took up their position on the damp, salty sands.

In front of the cheering soldiers, they jousted one, picked fresh lances, wheeled around around and jousted a second time. In the second exchange, the English knight's shield was broken. The joust again would be to court, defeat and death. Yet the English knight seized another lance and prepared for battle. His French opponent instead dismounted and walked towards him, chivalrously refusing to take advantage. The fight was over. The English night and the French night became lifelong friends. It's a charming story, beloved by the chroniclers and one which reminds us of the chivalric code

of honor they loved to celebrate. Two days later, the armist would meet again. The result would be remembered for a very different reason. I'm Tim Halford, and you're listening to cautionary tales. Nearly 700 years ago, the English King Edward III and the French King Philip VI, were at war. It doesn't really matter why. All you need to know is that King Edward was claiming to be the rightful ruler not only of England, but of France, his richer, larger, more powerful neighbour.

He destroyed King Philip's French navy. He had spent six weeks cutting a bloody sway across northern France. His soldiers raping, murdering, and pillaging their way through French cities. In a demonstration that the French King Philip wasn't much of a king at all if he couldn't protect his own subjects from the English invaders. It had taken time for King Philip to assemble his response, but eventually a mighty army of French knights was chasing Edward's smaller English force across France, gathering strength as they went.

Philip's knights were terrifying shock troops, heavily arm armored men on powerful horses, able to charge on mass with crushing force, while being impervious to all but the fiercest or most accurate blows. They were also rich, powerful men, to afford the horse, the armor and the support crew you had to be. The English archers weren't rich or powerful, and there was no tidal estuary to protect them from the French cavalry this time, just a long, steady, grassy slope stretching away beneath where they were sitting, resting from digging themselves some fortifications and waiting for the French to show up.

The view was even better from the windmill behind them, from where the English-King Edward would survey the battlefield in between giving pet torques to his men. Those pet torques were sorely needed. They knew that when the French army caught up with them, the enemy would be thirsty for revenge. And although the English had picked the battlefield, the French had home advantage, better equipment and vastly superior numbers. Both sides had reason to be confident. For one of them, that confidence was utterly misplaced.

I'm fascinated by the battle that was about to unfold. In some ways it was very much of its time. In other ways, it offers us a very modern cautionary tale. Having crossed the river and pursued the retreating English army, King Philip sent out Scouts to assess the situation. The Scouts reported back. The English had taken up position on a low ridge near the village of Cracey. The French, remember, had more than three times as many nights, the medieval equivalent of having three times as many tanks. The heavily armoured French

cavalry had been the dominant military force in Western Europe for the last 500 years. The French also had several thousand crossbow men from Genoa. These were experienced mercenary troops. The Genoaese were a deadly strike force, equipped not only with the murderously effective crossbow, but with large, specialized shields with spiked bottoms. The crossbow men would jam the spike into the ground, letting the shield serve as cover. Behind this portable wall, this unit of hired killers was a well-equipped, well-drilled machine. But despite his advantages, King Philip of France had reason to be wary. The English knights were supported by 5,000 well-trained archers, armed with longbows. The longbow was a simple weapon, but it took skill to make and skill to use.

Longbow's were crafted from a single piece of you, with a strong golden heartward facing the archer and the buttery, stretchy sapwood facing the enemy. Not as complex or as powerful as a crossbow perhaps, but easy to carry and quick to draw, and the English archers had had all day to prepare the ground. Philip Scouts reported that the archers were standing behind a line of spikes that would break up any cavalry charge. What's more, the French army was spread out, marching in a long column towards the English, with late comers and supplies miles behind.

The special spiked shields for the Genoese crossbow men, for example, were back with the baggage. And after marching all that long summer's day alongside rich French nobles relaxing on their horses, one can only speculate about the mood amongst the Genoese. So as his sprawling army continued its rapid march towards the battlefield, King Philip sought the advice of his most trusted counsellor, Henri Le Muin. Your Majesty, your soldiers have been on the road all day. Let us not now charge into the setting sun.

We should halt and eat and rest. Tomorrow we shall attack in the name of God and St George. King Philip agreed. He gave the order to halt. And what followed was chaos. Here's a French author Jean-Fuassard writing a few years after the event. At this command the front ranks halted, but those behind continued to advance, saying they would not stop until they'd caught up with the leaders.

And when the leaders saw the others coming, they went on also. So pride and vanity took charge of events. Each wanted to outshine his companions, regardless of the advice of the Galen Clamoyne. Remember that joust? Remember the spirit of chivalry? No French knight wanted to get a reputation for cowards. No French knight wanted to have his honour question because he had hung back while others had forged ahead.

King Philip wanted his army to rest before the battle. The army, however, had its own ideas. Was the French army determined to ignore King Philip's orders? It certainly acted that way, but there was something more subtle going on. In the 1960s and 70s, the economist Thomas Shelling became fascinated by the connections between the motivations of individuals and the group dynamics that emerged from those motivations. He'd been struck by a strange experience when he'd been invited to give a prestigious lecture in front of a large audience. As he stood in the wings with a microphone being clipped to his lapel, he couldn't see a single person in the lecture theatre. Row after row was empty. I was puzzled when my host walked on stage,

nodded to the rows of empty seats and went through the motions of introducing me. Resisting slightly, I was pushed gently out of the wings and toward the rostrum. There were 800 people in the hall, densely packed from thirteenth row to the distant rear wall. Afterwards I asked my hosts why they had arranged the seating that way. They hadn't. There were no seating arrangements and no ushers. The arrangement was voluntary and could only reflect the preferences of the audience. What were those preferences? Shelling could only guess. What were those preferences? Shelling could only guess. Perhaps people wanted to be seated as far as possible away from the stage, in which case,

the result was just fine. But more likely, people didn't actually want to be so far away from the stage. They merely wanted to be closer than others to the exit, so they could make a quick getaway. Or fearing that Professor Shelling might start calling on audience members to answer questions about economic theory, they simply preferred not to be conspicuously out in front of the crowd. In those cases, everyone would be happier if the rear 12 rows were roped off, forcing the entire audience closer to the stage. Shelling's point was not about the optimal seating arrangements for academic lectures.

That was trivial. It was the realization that perfectly ordinary individual motives can lead to the emergence of quite unexpected group behavior. Nobody planned for Shelling to be speaking to his audience across a moat of empty seats, but that's what happened. So, in what other circumstances might strange outcomes emerge from apparently innocuous individual decisions? This question was not a trivial one. Shelling served as a senior adviser to the US government, thinking hard about the problem of nuclear deterrence,

and all the ways in which deterrence could backfire, for example, when leaders lose control of events. Shelling's work had inspired Stanley Kubrick's classic black comedy of nuclear Armageddon, Dr. Strangelove. Shelling had even spent an afternoon brainstorming with Kubrick about how a war might accidentally begin. If you've seen the film, you may recall that the trouble is started by a belligerent mid-ranking officer, despite the best efforts of the leaders of the USA and Soviet Union to slow things down. The command structure of a Cold War nuclear strike force is very different from the command structure of a 14th century feudal army, but still, King Philip might have recognized the same energy.

Tom Schelling eventually won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his ideas, which were collected in a book titled, Micromotives and Macro Behaviour. The links between micromotives and macro behaviour can be complex, but it's a good idea to try to understand them if you want to lead an army. When the French chronicler Jean-Fouassard wrote his account of the chaotic French March, it could have come right out of Schelling's book. King Philip Recall had ordered his army to stop and rest overnight, and the army had not stopped. Yet, Frasar didn't say that the French army wanted to fight at once. In fact, the army as a whole didn't have any coherent desire at all, plus are instead focused on individuals. The rear

ranks refused to stop until they had caught the leaders, while the leading ranks refused to be caught. Nobody wanted to charge unprepared at an entrenched enemy, they just didn't want to be vulnerable to the accusation of cowardice, of hanging back while there peers advanced. At Tom Schelling's lecture, nobody had wanted to sit at the front. This time, nobody wanted to stop at the back. Because of the individual behaviour of French knights, the French army as a whole simply would not and could not stop. It ended up at the bottom of the hill, milling around in plain view of the bemused English archers. So King Philip decided he had no alternative to give the order to attack. As the summer afternoon began to cool, the English gays down the hill at the French

Army gradually assembling. With the French knights still gathering, King Philip sent forth his elite Genoese crossbow men to soften up the English archers. The Genoese can't have been impressed. They'd been carrying their heavy crossbows all day. They hadn't had a chance to rest or eat, and now their employers, the French nobility, wanted them to wipe out the English longbows so that the French knights could get down to the real business of fighting the English knights. First of all, they hadn't had a chance to retrieve their shields from back in the French army's baggage wagons.

As the English wearily watched the Genoese approach, a sudden spectacular summer shower passed across the battlefield. It was a bit of luck for the English archers who could easily unstring and restring their simple longbows, keeping their bowstrings dry under their hats. The Genoese crossbows, far more complex tools, could not be so easily dismantled. Their strings got wet, loosening them and reducing their range, and as the Genoese continued their approach across the softened earth, the English archers must have been delighted when they noticed that the crossbow men hadn't brought their shields. The English archers watched them halt and load their crossbows. Perhaps because of the wet

bow strings or perhaps because the shieldless Genoines were slightly shy of getting too close. The crossbow men stopped just a little too far away. The first volley of several thousand crossbow bolts fell short of the English lines. There was no second volley. His fwasa. The English archers took one pace forward and poured out their arrows on the genuines so thickly and evenly that they fell like snow. When they felt those arrows piercing their arms, their heads, their faces, the genuines who

had never met such archers before were thrown into confusion. Many threw down their crossbows, they began to fall back. King Philip was enraged, although he only had himself to blame. He never took the crossbowmen seriously, hadn't thought about how to use them effectively and doesn't seem to have been surprised that they failed. He decided that it was time for the real fighting to start, which meant a cavalry charge. The contemptible crossbow men had outlived their usefulness. Quick now!

Kill all that rabble! You're only getting in our way! Hundreds of the most eager French knights charged up the hill towards the English, hacking their way through the retreating genoes as they did. Showing murderous scorn for their own allies, they got what they deserved. Their charge was slowed by the chaos, the rain so ground, the uphill slope, and foot deep potholes that the English soldiers had been digging all day. All the wild, 5,000 English archers deluged them with arrows.

The armored knights were fairly well protected, but their horses were not. The charge faltered, then disintegrated, just as it reached the English lines. The English knights, fighting on foot, drove the French back across the muddy battlefield, which was already littered with dying horses and helpless men. By now the August sun was low in the sky. The English position was still perilous, they were on foreign soil and heavily outnumbered. It still wasn't too late for the French to withdraw, regroup and plan a fresh attack in the morning. But where was the glory in that? Forward road King John of Bohemia.

He was one of King Philip's great allies and a veteran of many battles. He was also 50 years old and an infection had taken away his eyesight more than a decade before. He wasn't going to let that stop him. Here's Jean-Fuassard's account of the great charge of the blind king of Bohemia. He said to them about him, I require you to bring me so far forward that I may strike one stroke with my sword. They said they would do his commandment, and the intent that they should not lose him

in the press, they tied all their reins of their bridles each to other, and so they went on their enemies. King John's doomed charge onto the blades of an enemy he couldn't even see. It perfectly embodied both the courage and the stupidity of the entire French cavalry. Here's Frossard again. The king was so far forward that he made many strokes with his sword and fought violently and his company ventured so far forward that they were there all slain. And the next day they were found in the place about the king and all

their horses tied to each other. The fighting had been ferocious on both sides but the story had been the same. By the time the second French charge had been struck with 20 or 30 thousand arrows and crossed the soft ground and the spikes and holes and the fallen men and horses, the impetus had been completely lost. The English knights, fighting on foot around the king's son, the Black Prince, repelled what was left of the French. The French still had plenty of cavalry left.

Much of the French army was still in the process of arriving on the battlefield, and in total the French had 8,000 knights, while the English had just over 2,000. Each knight was eager for battle and glory, and so a fresh attack emerged from the chaos, with knights skillfully swinging their horses around at the bottom of the hill to charge once more, up through the mud, over the bodies of the dying horses around at the bottom of the hill to charge once more up through the mud over the bodies of the dying and into the teeth of 5,000 English archers. The result was no different to the first two charges. Chaos, dead horses, armored men helpless and the faltering French charge thrown back by

the English knights after some tough, hand-to-hand fighting. Across the battlefield, unhaused French knights slipped and floundered in the mud. Some drowned as the slime filled their helmets. The French kept ignoring the archers, partly because they were protected by pits and spikes, but partly because the rules of chivalry demanded that Knight fight with Knight. The first charge had failed. The second charge had failed.

The third charge had failed. What next? King John of Bohemia may have perished, but his stubborn spirit lived on. The French Knights charged again. In the historical graphic novel, Cresy, one English archer sums up the madness in a short sentence. They're just not getting it. 672 years after the Battle of Cracy, the Harvard Business Review 2018 published a long article titled, The Leaders Guide to Corporate Culture. In many ways it's the kind of beige corporate speak

you might expect, with a 2x2 matrix, a list of the 8 distinctive styles of corporate culture, and over 80 mentions of leader or leadership. It feels a long way from the mud and the blood and the dead horses and the dead men on the battlefield of Cracey. But the management gurus in the Harvard Business Review actually pinpoint the French problem with uncanny accuracy. What is culture, they ask? First, it's a group phenomenon. Culture is

something you share with other people. Second, it's pervasive. It's all around you like water is all around a fish. Third, it's enduring. Culture doesn't change quickly. And fourth, it's implicit. People say stuff and think stuff and do stuff without articulating why. The French and the English nobility had a common culture in many ways, just think of that celebrated chivalric joust. But the English were proving that, given enough time, culture can change. For example, the English had once shared the French view that bows were the weapons of Craven Wimps, an old song mocked the archer as a coward

who dare not come close to his foe, and the Catholic church had condemned the murderous crossbow. The French had brought bowmen to the battle, but they didn't take them seriously. If they had, King Philip would never have sent them into battle without their special shields, and he would never have sent a cavalry charge right over the top of them. In contrast, King Edward III built his tactics at Cresy around the Longbow. But that wasn't a decision made on the spur of the moment, Hitler longs seen the Longbow as his best chance

to defeat France, a richer, larger, more populous neighbor. And to embrace the Longbow, meant reshaping the culture. Edward forgave the debts of the crafters who made the Longbow's and their arrows. Symbolically, that was much more important than just paying them a bonus. And he commanded that all men over the age of 12 should practice archery for two hours after

church each Sunday on pain of death. King Edward made that law nine years before the battle of Cracey. The French attitude to their crossbow men was one of contempt. The English attitude to their longbow men was one of respect, but that respect had been carefully cultivated by the King. As I say, culture can change, but it takes time. The French nobility didn't have that time. After five centuries of proven success in which heavily armored charges had smashed enemy after enemy, they were suddenly having to rethink. That's not easy, because the chivalric culture constrained the way the French nobles saw the situation and their reactions to what they saw. And like any culture, it was so deeply ingrained

that it was hard even to perceive those constraints, let alone discuss them. They were focused on acts of individual valor, noble knight against noble knight. That didn't leave much room for dealing with archers hiding behind spikes, or opponents who let their horses graze while they fought on foot, or even for a coordinated approach to combat. Nobody on the French side seems to have said, maybe we shouldn't keep charging up that mudslide. Nobody seems to have said, if they keep shooting the horses from under us, shouldn't we attack on foot?

Nobody seems to have said, these guys are outnumbered and isolated, times on our side. What's the hurry to attack at all? It wasn't that the French knights had the wrong answers. It was that they weren't even able to ask the right questions. The French tactics were disastrous, and it's natural to leap to the conclusion that the French culture of chivalry and feudalism that produced those tactics was a foolish culture. But that's too easy. After all, French heavy cavalry had been dominant for hundreds of years until that moment.

The entire feudal culture had grown up around the need to meet the cost of putting these expensively equipped warriors in the field. If your shock troops are also the noblemen, the richest members of your society, you need a way to motivate them to put themselves in harm's way, hence the Chivalric Code of Honour, and French knights who would quite literally rather die than lose their reputation. In the 1960s, the historian Lin White Jr. famously argued that the entire edifice of feudalism rested on the appearance of the stirrup, a technology which made cavalry more effective.

You don't need to go quite that far to see that the French culture of chivalry was bound up with a French reliance on heavily armoured knights. And that for 500 years, that culture and that reliance had delivered success after success, until it didn't. Because as the Harvard Business Review could tell you, the thing about culture

is that it isn't easy to change. It's tempting to think that this story is only relevant to a bunch of stupid rich French nobles seven centuries ago. But is it? In 2018, I attended a barren storming lecture given by a fellow journalist, the then editor-in-chief of the Washington Post, Marty Baron. I write for another great old newspaper the Financial Times, and I wanted to hear what Mr Baron would say about the challenges newspapers were facing. Those challenges were immense. New technology had changed everything.

New rivals who didn't have to pay for the old print infrastructure were offering cheap, viral news online. Advertising revenues critical for any newspaper, and especially for a newspaper with a strong local base, had been cannibalized by Craigslist, Google and Facebook. Cranks and extremists could find a large and profitable audience armed only with a social media platform. And many of the public had lost faith in the mainstream media, nearly half of American voters thought the news media fabricated stories about the then president. A substantial minority opposed the freedom of the press and considered accurate but unwelcome stories to be fake news. Just like the French nights in 1346, newspapers were facing new competitors using new technologies and new tactics. So, what did Mr. Barron suggest?

Simple, he said, just do our job. He cited the Washington Post's core principles, principles which date back to the 1930s when the present incarnation of the newspaper was launched. As I sat there, I was genuinely moved. Absolutely, back to basics, charge once again. But then I was part of the same culture. It was only after I took some time to think that I realised Mr Baron had simply said, in the face of disasters, let's

keep doing exactly what we're doing. But I, a fellow newspaper journalist, had thought this to be an inspirational message. The flower of the French nability would have been proud of us both. But culture, remember, is pervasive, shared, and implicit. No wonder it's slow to change. When they encountered the English longbow, the French discovered over the course of a

disaster a summer evening that their basic military approach had become obsolete. It was time for an instant rethink. But our own culture couldn't change that quickly. Why would dare? As twilight deepened over the battlefield, the French knights charged again and again and again. 15 times in total. Each attempt was more hopeless than the last. When darkness fell, King Edward set fire to the windmill that had served as his observation post. As the building burned, the English archers pulled out long daggers and roamed the battlefield in the flickering orange light, slipping the blades into the vulnerable armpits or isolates of fallen knights.

When they found any in difficulty, whether they were counts, barons, knights or squires, they killed them without mercy. Because of this, many were slaughtered that evening, regardless of their rank. At Cracey, a glimpse of a ruthless, impersonal future fought a glimpse of a heroic, mythical past, and left it bleeding out into the mud. Thousands of French soldiers died. Then the day after the battle, the English army killed another 4,000 French, many of who may have been civilians who got too close to the battlefield, or presumed that the victorious soldiers were French, not English.

From the ranks of 8,000 French knights, 1,500 noble men were slain. Nine of them, princes. All over France, noble families began murderous squabbles over succession. The English, a generally reckoned to have lost fewer than a hundred men. The scale of their victory and of the French defeat was so colossal, so total that they could hardly comprehend it.

They set off to conquer the port of Calais, which they were to hold for the next 212 years. King Philip himself fled the battlefield, wounded in the jaw by an arrow and a pole at the disaster. Accompanied by just five nights, he knocked on the door of La Breuille Castle a few miles away. Open your gate quickly. It is the unfortunate King of France, unfortunate indeed. King Philip's reputation did not recover. Three years later, he was dead, and the French nobility did not much miss him. But they should have blamed themselves for the catastrophe. The French knights were no angels, just asked the Genoese crossbowmen, the allies they hacked down. But their culture emphasized valor and courage. 500 years of success had led them to forget that the chief aim of battle isn't honour.

It's victory. Their English opponents brought new technology and new tactics, and the French knights just couldn't adapt in time. For a list of our sources, please see the show notes at timhalford.com. Horsesionary Tales is written by me, Tim Halford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan Dilly with support from Courtney Garino and Emily Vaughn. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Weiss. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Gutridge, Stella Halford and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Mia LeBel, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, John Schnarrs, Julia Barton,

Carly McGleory, Eric Sandler, Royston Besserv, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Marano, Daniel LaCarn, and Maya Canig. Corsary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. Tell a friend, tell two friends, and if you want to hear the show ads free and listen to four exclusive Corsairry Tales shorts, then sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus.