What Can Modern Day Business Leaders Learn From Confederate Failures At The Battle of Franklin?

Business managers from Franklin-based MEDHOST experimented with the new job training on the grounds of the Battle of Franklin. Credit: Priscilla Harris Photography.

Business leaders in Middle Tennessee are experimenting with a new kind of professional development workshop based on history that’s 150 years old. They’re drawing lessons from the failures of Confederate generals and applying them to modern-day corporate America.

“What would our business community do today if they were faced with the same tasks that those people were facing yesterday?” asks Thomas Flagel, author and historian.

Flagel is also a board member with the Battle of Franklin Trust. He’s helping Vanderbilt’s business school with the program. They invite companies to send their managers to spend a day touring sites around the Franklin battlefield, where General John Bell Hood ordered an assault on Union troops and was soundly defeated.

“History is all psychology,” Flagel says. “We are all human, and we are going to make mistakes, but it’s how we learn from those mistakes that’s going to matter for the future. Lots of business leaders could have learned from the past mistakes in the 2008 recession, for example. So this program is to really get business people to analyze everything around them, the past included.”

They also toured to the Carnton Plantation, which evolved into a Civil War hospital during the Battle of Franklin. The Confederate graveyard next to the plantation was one of the group’s last stops on the tour.

Franklin-based health care company MEDHOST was one of the first to try out the program. Manager Patty Eckler, who is from Chicago, says she knew very little about the Civil War going in. But she found something that might apply back at the office.

“General Hood sort of forged ahead without consideration of all the factors and we as managers sometimes get head down and focused on our short-term goal and forget to check and analyze all the issues around us,” Eckler says.

The Battle of Franklin’s 150^th anniversary lands in late November. Organizers are trying to use the celebration to promote their unconventional professional development program.