Lead Like Julius Caesar

When a book promises to extract leadership lessons from ancient history, it's not uncommon to find superficial treatments that reduce complex historical figures to bullet-pointed management tips. "Lead Like Julius Caesar: Timeless Leadership Lessons from History's Most Influential Leader" by Paul Vanderbroeck is emphatically not one of those books.

What distinguishes this work is the rare convergence of credentials its author brings to the subject. As a starting point, Vanderbroeck holds a PhD in the sociological study of leadership in Ancient Rome and so his engagement with Caesar is the culmination of decades of scholarly inquiry. Yet he is equally versed in the practical realities of leadership, having served as an HR executive for 15 years and worked extensively as an executive coach with senior leaders across multiple sectors. This dual expertise of academic rigor combined with real-world application gives the book added authority.

The book's premise is that Julius Caesar deserves singular attention not merely as a significant leader, but as arguably the most influential leader in history. As Vanderbroeck notes in the preface, Caesar's name became synonymous with supreme leadership itself - Kaiser, Czar, Caesar - a linguistic legacy unmatched by any other historical figure. More remarkably, Caesar created the archetypes that still structure how we conceptualize leadership moments: crossing the Rubicon as the definitive point of no return, "I came, I saw, I conquered" as the victory speech template, the Ides of March as the ultimate cautionary tale of betrayal.

But Vanderbroeck refuses to offer Caesar as an unalloyed model for emulation. Instead, he embraces what makes this case study so valuable: Caesar's "imperfect story." The focus is not just on Caesar's strengths, but also on areas in which he was less effective. The very fact that Caesar's career ended in assassination - a leadership failure by any measure - becomes pedagogically powerful.

As Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, CEO of 20-first, puts it, "The lesson for our times is that leaders are made as much from their low points as their 'highs'. That they learn as much from failure as from success and harness the lessons to master the next challenge." Her observation that "you'll never read history quite the same again" speaks to the transformative quality of Vanderbroeck's approach as history serves as a mirror for contemporary leadership challenges.

By analysing both Caesar's triumphs and catastrophic misjudgements through frameworks like the Leadership Pipeline and the Global Executive Leadership Mirror (GELM), Vanderbroeck provides readers with a nuanced, three-dimensional understanding of leadership development.

Vanderbroeck has spent his career - from his doctoral research on leader-follower dynamics in Caesar's era to his 2012 article comparing the Roman Republic's crisis with the 2008 financial collapse - deepening his understanding of this period and these personalities. His 2014 examination of Caesar as "Cleopatra's manager" in Leadership Strategies for Women demonstrates his willingness to view familiar historical relationships through fresh analytical lenses.

"Lead Like Julius Caesar" represents something increasingly rare: a business book of intellectual substance, written by someone qualified to bridge the 2,000-year gap between Caesar's world and our own. Leadership lessons derived from shallow historical readings often collapse under scrutiny. But when a historian who has dedicated years to understanding the political, military, and social dynamics of Caesar's world also possesses the vocabulary and frameworks of modern leadership development, the resulting insights carry genuine weight.