What Waterloo Taught Me About Leading Through Fu*k Ups

When I stood with my children at Waterloo, looking out over the battlefield maquette with 200,000

soldiers, 45,000 horses, 600 cannons, reduced to a scale model you can walk around in ten minutes. My

kids were looking for Napoleon. I was looking for something else: the exact point where one of history's

sharpest strategic minds lost everything.

I've spent 25 years building things across borders, a national NGO, industrial partnerships worth millions,

mentoring relationships that outlast the projects that started them. And I've learned that the question that

matters most isn't "how do you win." It's "what do you do after you lose." Napoleon's career answers

both, which is why I keep returning to him.

Five lessons from a battlefield and experienced in personal and business life

Standing at Waterloo, I found myself running through the same framework I use to evaluate any strategy,

mine included.

Agility. Napoleon built his early career on speed: deciding faster than his opponents could react, and

adjusting mid-battle when the plan met reality. In business, the advantage rarely goes to whoever has the

best plan on paper. It goes to whoever adjusts fastest when the plan meets a market that doesn't cooperate.

Execution. Brilliant strategy without action is just an interesting document. Napoleon's early victories

weren't won by superior thinking alone; they were won because he moved while his enemies were still

deliberating. I've sat across the table from consultants with beautiful frameworks and no results. The

framework isn't the work. Hard work with massive action can make a difference.

Intelligence and data. Napoleon's early campaigns were built on obsessive study of terrain, weather, and

enemy positioning. He won because he understood the field better than the people standing on it. In

business today, "the field" is market data, negotiation leverage, and knowing exactly what the other side

needs and not what they say they need. Strategy without intelligence is just a guess with good posture.

Confidence but not overconfidence. At Waterloo, Napoleon underestimated Wellington and

overestimated his own position. That single miscalculation ended an empire in one afternoon. I've

watched the same pattern play out in boardrooms: the deal that fails not because the strategy was wrong,

but because someone stopped checking whether it was relevant.

Moral, responsible leadership. Napoleon's soldiers didn't follow him because of rank. They followed him

because he led from the front and made them believe in something larger than the mission. Leadership

isn't the authority to tell people what to do. It's the ability to make people want to do it, assisting them to

find their own voice and direction.

My own Waterloos

I didn't write those five lessons as theory. I wrote them because I've lived every one of them including

losing everything fucking up many times.

In the late 90 ties, I set out to bring JCI, a global leadership development organization to Portugal. No

chapter existed. Almost culture of structured youth leadership existed. I built it from a meeting of 5

people to events of 120. By the end of 2000 all of it had collapsed. No board, no organization, no

sustainability. I reflected on what worked and what did not work and most probably what would never

work.I could have treated that as the end of the story. Instead, I went back in 2002, rebuilt the international

relationships I'd need, and restarted more structure instead of just enthusiasm. In 2004, JCI Portugal was

legally founded. By November 2006, it had achieved full international affiliation and cast its first vote as

a member of the global federation. In January 2007, I became its first Senator in Portugal.

Here's the part that matters more than the comeback: JCI Portugal later lost that full affiliation too. Status

like that isn't permanent, it must be earned and re-earned, project by project, generation by generation,

consistent hard work. Today, under a new wave of leadership, the organization is once again close to

reclaiming what it lost. I still serve as one of its mentors. Not because I have all the answers, but because

I've already walked the specific road of losing something you built and choosing to rebuild it anyway

Bringing this into the field, globally

That's the vision I bring to leaders today, across every context I work in.

In my strategic consulting work connecting EPC contractors with the workforce and partnerships needed

to execute complex industrial projects, I see the same five failures on repeat: strategies that never move to

execution, negotiations built on assumption instead of intelligence, confidence that curdles into blind

spots, and leadership that manages people instead of inspiring them. My value isn't that I have a different,

smarter framework than anyone else. It's that I've been the general who lost more than 1 battle and I know

exactly what rebuilding looks like from the inside, not the outside. Falling and just standing up is not an

option. You have to understand why and then focus on standing up again and strengthen resilience

muscles again and again.

That same principle is why mentor local organizations in Europe as certified senator mentor and not just

within JCI. I'm invited back as a mentor for Lightening Up the Stars, and I serve in the Mentors Network

of the Nova SBE Haddad Entrepreneurship Institute, working with early-stage founders and startups as

they move from idea to market reality. Across both, the pattern repeats: brilliant young founders with

strong technical instincts and strategy decks, who freeze at the exact moment execution requires them to

negotiate, to decide fast with incomplete information, or to recover from a setback they didn't see coming.

My job isn't to give them a better plan. It's sitting with them through their own small Waterloo, and show

them; having past trough this several times ; that the collapse is not the end of the story but just a new

beginning to get closer to the results.

Some questions I keep asking

Walking away from that battlefield maquette, my children still hunting for a tiny painted figure of

Napoleon, I kept returning to the same three questions I ask every leader I mentor, and every client I sit

across from:

What's your own Waterloo in business, in leadership, in life?

Did you learn from it, or did you just survive it?

Are you leading today with the clarity Napoleon had in 1805 or the overconfidence he had in 1815?