“To begin everything is to finish nothing.” - Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon was obsessed with getting things finished. To the extent that he insisted that large projects be finished bit by bit:

“For a canal or road, he wished that it be completely open at an initial point and the work carried forward without interruption, en each case finishing the section that had been begun. ‘It is better,’ he would say, ‘to achieve a canal of ten leagues every ten years than to have to wait a century for a canal of a hundred leagues to be finished.’

If it were a question of putting in a new road, what good was it to dig the whole length of it at once? It was to unroll like a ribbon, in increments of six feet.”

The takeaway: If you have a large project, figure out how you can make it useful along the way. For example, when James Clear wrote his bestselling book Atomic Habits, he released each chapter as a blog post.

I call this idea “build for now, build for later.”

“The power of his government lay in the unity of a system whose soul he was; his most important concern was to maintain harmony between himself and his ministers.” - Baron Fain

The above quote reminds me of a quote that I recently discovered via my friend, David Senra: “The founder is the guardian of the company's soul.”

It seems Napoleon would agree. As a leader, your job is to know the soul of your organization and stay true to that soul no matter the cost.

“Each minister provided record books according to examples that Napoleon himself had created; nothing was to be changed in the format of the arrangement of subjects.”

Napoleon loved his records, and he kept detailed books on every matter of government. In his war records:

“Each regiment appeared in the book in numerical order: each had its own page, and in the columns were found the names of the colonel and major, a list of the occasions when the regiment had distinguished itself, in which army and which active division each battalion had been deployed, the location assigned to the depot, [etc]”

He made every effort to keep his books very similar. His naval records were the same, except captains and admirals replaced colonels and majors.

He even endeavored to keep his records on finance and infrastructure similar.

His ability to switch between topics with complete fluency owes much to this system of record-keeping. He could keep the same mental framework as he changed topics.

Consider how you can make records and reporting the same across functions in order to be more efficient with your leadership.