There is no higher and simpler law of strategy than that of keeping one’s forces concentrated,” wrote Clausewitz. (Side note: If you’re interested in a smart overview of the history of military strategy, including Clausewitz’s work, I recommend U.S. Naval War College Professor Andrew R. Wilson’s Teaching Company course Masters of War: History’s Greatest Strategic Thinkers. I also recommend the essays of retired West Point professor Dr. Michael Hennelly, who has done extensive thinking on the translation of strategic principles into the business world.)

Resistance to earning our way is the common lot of humanity—we all resent deeply having to grow up—but one way or another, most of us make our peace with the requirement short of criminal recalcitrance. Arthur Wolff could not. The compulsion never to bring himself under discipline ruled his psyche. There was, finally, nothing and no one that could more command his loyalty. The need to have the best, and not pay for it, determined every move he made until the day he died.

“Okay. But as a baseline, that’s about a hundred thousand hours’ work before you retire. Imagine what you could accomplish if you put it all into one thing. And what are you putting it into? A flat in Shoreditch?”

“Tolstoy says this thing in War and Peace that the higher up an organisation you go, the less freedom you really have. At the bottom, you can do whatever you feel like because it doesn’t make much difference, but at the top, if you’re Napoleon or the Tsar, the responsibility is so big you just have to do what the logic of the situation dictates.”

And he insisted with every tool of his personality that they see the situation as he saw it, that they feel as he felt or as he convinced himself he did. As he worked on them, they began to tentatively sense – not as with James, that they were led by a man of admirable vision and ability – but that they were in this together, and that they wanted themselves to succeed.