alexander

Leadership Process One: Reframing Problems 11
2: Battle at the River Hydaspes
This lesson considers the task of defeating a much larger army
that had war elephants, around which Alexander’s cavalry
would not fight. In antiquity, defeating an army possibly three
times your size required a non-resource-based solution. In this
case, Alexander reframed the problem. Instead of relying on
military might, the solution rested on an elegantly choreographed
use of the enemy’s very strengths against them.
Toward the end of the decade-long campaign, Alexander
fought the last of his four great battles near the western
border of India, on the River Hydaspes, near the city of
Haranpur.
Once Alexander got his army across the River Hydaspes
(see Lesson 10), he faced an impossible task. The king opposing
him, Porus, had a much larger army (outnumbering
Alexander’s by more than three to one) at a time when size
almost always determined the outcome of a battle. (Until
the invention of gunpowder, the larger army almost invariably
defeated the smaller one by bringing more forces to
bear at the point of contact. The exceptions to this rule are
rare, and they are battles remembered by history precisely
because of the mismatched sizes of the forces.) Porus also
had 200 war elephants, an awesome force in those days.
These elephants warrant our attention because they provide
an invaluable lesson in leadership (and its twin, strategy).
Any reading of the literature surrounding Alexander
shows that his cavalry was the key to his military prowess.
He was a cavalry general, after all. Unfortunately, we have