Creative Execution: What Great Leaders Do to Unleash Bold Thinking and Innovation

The Nelson Touch

The story of Nelson is one of tactical genius and emotional upheavals, which provides the classic blueprint for Hollywood movies—his young rise to power, his successive defeats of Napoleon’s battle fleets, his passionate affair with Emma Hamilton, and his glorified death at Trafalgar. Two hundred years after the battle, more than 100 biographies of Nelson have been written, with more on the way. The battle’s bicentennial in 2005 drew no less than 35 navies to the Solent (the strait that separates the Isle of Wight from mainland England), including those of France and Spain, with similar commemorative events taking place in Cadiz and Toulon. Much of this adulation is a result of the fact that Nelson not only delivered England ...