Leadership in Challenging Times

What can current and future leaders earn from John Monash's leadership?

Good morning.

I would like to begin by acknowledging the Bunurong people of the Kulin Nation, the traditional owners of the land on which this Shrine of Remembrance stands and where we gather today.

I also acknowledge and warmly welcome our veterans, current serving members of the Australian Defence Force, honoured guests, community leaders, families, and all those gathered here — and I thank the Rotary Club of Melbourne and the 0808 Committee for organising this annual service to remember the Australian contribution at the Battle of Amiens, and the great Australian leader who commanded the Allied forces there, General Sir John Monash GCMG KCB VD.

Among his many civilian roles, Monash was also a Charter Member and President of the Rotary Club of Melbourne from 1922 to 1923. My thanks to Rotary for inviting me to speak today.

We come together to honour the service and sacrifice of those who fought at the Battle of Amiens on 8 August 1918.

History records Amiens as the great turning point of the First World War — a decisive Allied victory on the Western Front that marked the start of the Hundred Days Offensive which ultimately ended the war. Allied troops from Australia, Canada, Britain and France fought under Monash as one force, and tanks, infantry and aircraft worked together in a genuinely new way of war. It was a bold, surprise attack that shattered the enemy's lines.

But at any commemorative service, we must pause and remember the cost. Amiens helped end a war, but freedom and peace carried a heavy price. Allied casualties exceeded 46,000; German losses were estimated at around 75,000 — a stark reminder of the human cost behind every step toward peace.

I was asked to share my thoughts today on what great Australian leadership looks like, now and into the future and what we can learn from Monash. History often shows us the qualities of great leadership — we simply need to recognise those qualities in the people who can lead us now, and deliberately build that potential in those that can lead in the future.

In my role as Executive Director of the General Sir John Monash Foundation's Leadership Academy, I design leadership programs for John Monash Scholars. The scholarship was first awarded in 2004, and more than 300 have been awarded since. Just as Britain has the Rhodes Scholarship and America has the Fulbright, a group of Australians believed our country deserved its own scholarship — and with Commonwealth Government support, our Foundation was established to deliver it. Scholars are selected on three attributes: excellence, service and leadership — qualities Monash himself embodied, which is why the scholarship carries his name.

Ninety-Three Minutes

Before we turn to Amiens itself, wind the clock back five weeks, to 4 July 1918, and the Battle of Le Hamel, where Monash also commanded Allied forces.

Ninety-three minutes. That is how long it took to win that battle — planned down to the minute, coordinating infantry, tanks, artillery, aircraft and machine guns in a way never attempted before. Monash had promised his superiors ninety minutes. It took ninety-three.

That single fact tells you almost everything about the kind of leader Monash was. I don't want to speak of him this morning as a war hero frozen in bronze on a horse, gazing out over St Kilda Road. I want to talk about how useful he still is to us today — because Monash is a working case study in exactly the kind of leadership Australia needs again today.

The Engineer's Mind

Long before Amiens, Monash was a civil engineer, and the habits that made him a great general were built in boardrooms and on construction sites, not in uniform.

In the 1890s and 1900s, Monash became a pioneer of reinforced concrete construction in Australia, at a time when the material was viewed with real suspicion by a profession trained on steel and timber. As managing director of a company building bridges across Victoria in this unproven material, he had to convince sceptical clients, engineers and bankers to trust an unfamiliar technology with their money and the public's safety.

He did it through the same method he later brought to the battlefield: rigorous calculation, careful testing, and a refusal to ask anyone to trust something he had not already proven to himself.

This is why his name sits on our cities, on a university, on our currency, on a medal, and on a Foundation and its scholarships. He was never only a soldier. He was, in sequence and sometimes simultaneously, an engineer, a company director, a lawyer, a musician, a linguist, a university administrator — and, after the guns fell silent, the man who built the electricity grid that powered an entire state for the better part of a century.

An engineer asks "how do we redesign the system so it holds?" It was a habit Monash had practised for two decades before he ever applied it to a battlefield. When he looked at the trench warfare of the Western Front and refused to accept stalemate as simply the price of war, he was treating an intractable problem as a design problem, to be solved through evidence rather than accepted through habit.

If we look at Australia's hardest problems today: housing supply that hasn't kept pace with population growth, an energy grid carrying a renewables transition on infrastructure built for a different century, an aged care system straining under demand, regional communities watching services disappear. None of these are, at bottom, problems of villainy. They are problems of design — badly synchronised systems, misaligned incentives, silos that calcified into habit long ago. The leaders we need are the ones with Monash's instinct, built the way he built it: through years of patient, often unglamorous practice, long before anyone hands them a crisis to solve.

Monash's leadership was tested, not once, but again and again, across several completely different arenas — in each of which failure would have been visible, measurable and permanent. That breadth is exactly why he rewards our attention this morning. We are not here simply to admire a monument. We are here to learn a method — what the founding CEO of my organisation, Ken Crompton, calls "the Monash Method."

To me there are 8 key Lessons in Leadership in the Monash Method-

1. Vision. Monash planned for long-term success, not just the next objective. Le Hamel was his proof of concept. Five weeks later, at Amiens, he proved the method wasn't a one-off — at far greater scale, with Australian troops fighting alongside Canadians, British and French along a fifteen-kilometre front. Allied forces advanced further in a single day than at any point since the trenches were first dug, four years earlier. German losses were so severe that it was referred to as "the black day of the German Army" — the day the German high command first understood the war could no longer be won. Days later, King George V arrived at Monash's headquarters and knighted him on the battlefield, the first time a British monarch had done so in well over a century.
   
   The lesson here is that a good idea needs a strategic plan that can scale. Plenty of promising ideas fail the moment someone tries to run them ten times larger, because the discipline that made them work quietly erodes. Australia is rarely short of pilot programs that succeed. What we lack is the discipline to scale them without losing what made them work.
   
   Leaders today need to move beyond short political cycles and consider how decisions on productivity, energy, housing, an ageing population and infrastructure interact over decades — and strategy is only valuable once translated into clear responsibilities, resources and measurable outcomes.

2. Courage. Monash challenged conventional military thinking, favouring careful planning and technology over costly, repeated frontal attacks. He was also an outsider for most of his career — the son of Jewish immigrants from Prussia, a citizen-soldier who had built his career as a civilian engineer and initially served only part-time in the militia. By the rigid social logic of the British Army of that era, none of this should have added up to command of over 200,000 troops. And it very nearly didn't. When he was proposed for command of the Australian Corps in 1918 — the largest force any Australian has commanded before or since — it caused real controversy, with a serious push to have him passed over for a more conventional choice. The objections were rarely about competence; they were about background, accent, and which clubs a man belonged to. He got the job anyway, largely because Prime Minister Billy Hughes and others were willing to spend political capital insisting competence should outrank pedigree. Monash repaid that faith immediately: Le Hamel within weeks of taking command, then Amiens, then a string of victories through the Hundred Days that historians now regard among the most effective sustained offensive operations of the war.
   
   There is an uncomfortable lesson here for how we choose leaders today. Are we promoting the person who fits the existing mould, or the person who can actually solve the problem in front of us?
   
   It is worth sitting with how close Australia came to denying itself its greatest military commander over exactly this instinct. We should not need a world war to relearn that lesson — whether we are talking about who leads a hospital, a council, a company or a cabinet room.

3. Systems thinking. This was arguably Monash's defining capability. His engineering background shaped how he treated the battlefield as an interconnected system of people, logistics, timing, artillery, communications, intelligence and armour. After the war, as chairman of the State Electricity Commission of Victoria, he built the Latrobe Valley's coal power system — the Yallourn power station and its township — that would electrify Victorian homes and industry for generations. He brought the same rigour: understand the whole system, sequence the work properly, bring in the right expertise. Complex problems such as climate adaptation and energy transition demand the same today — leaders who understand the whole system rather than optimise individual pieces of it.
4. Collaboration.  Monash coordinated multiple military disciplines within a multinational Allied command. He didn't need to know more than every specialist at the table — his strength was understanding enough of each discipline to ask the right questions and turn specialist knowledge into coherent action. Australia's major challenges today require government, business, universities and community organisations to cooperate, rather than operate in silos.
5. Integrity and stewardship. Monash understood that soldiers were not expendable resources. He saw careful preparation and the intelligent use of technology as ways of achieving objectives while reducing unnecessary casualties.
   Modern leadership similarly needs careful stewardship — of people, resources, institutions and the environment — not simply achievement of the immediate target.

6. Planning, Execution and Accountability. Monash's plans were extraordinarily detailed and well executed, and he remained accountable for his decisions. He didn't stop being useful to Australia on Armistice Day — his most enduring legacy came after the war was over and the medals had been handed out. Leadership doesn't end when the crisis does. The applause rightly goes to those who show up during the flood, the fire, the emergency. But the real test of character is whether you are still at the table two years later, doing the harder and far less visible work of rebuilding.
7. Communication. Monash placed great importance on morale and on ensuring soldiers understood what was expected of them, combining intellectual authority with genuine understanding of the people executing his plans.
   Vagueness at the top is never neutral — it is a cost that lands on whoever has the least power to push back. Leaders today need to be great communicators and explain not only what is changing, but why and they must always listen in return.

8. Learning. Monash was, throughout his life, almost compulsively willing to learn new fields — engineering, law, military theory, even music; he was a genuinely accomplished pianist. It was a lifelong refusal to assume his existing expertise was sufficient for whatever came next. When the war demanded he understand aircraft, tanks and logistics at a scale no Australian had managed, he already had the habit of picking up new domains quickly, because he had been doing exactly that his whole life. Leaders confronting AI, automation, climate change and geopolitical disruption need that same willingness to experiment and change their assumptions as evidence changes.
   All leaders are fallible; they make mistakes, because they are human. Rather than expect unquestioning agreement, Monash is recorded as having said: "I don't care a damn for your loyal service when you think I am right; when I really want it most is when you think I am wrong."
   That this quote reminds us that leaders need to command loyalty while allowing honest dissent; only then can they truly learn from their teams.
   The problems facing Australia over the next two decades will not respect the boundaries of anyone's existing training. Climate adaptation will demand people who understand both engineering and community psychology. Health reform will demand people who understand both clinical practice and data systems. Reconciliation and Closing the Gap will demand leaders who can hold historical and cultural complexity together with practical policy delivery. None of us were formally trained for the specific problems we are about to face. Monash's example suggests the answer is not to wait until you feel qualified, but to build, early and deliberately, the habit of learning new fields fast.

So, in summary, What Made Monash Unusually Successful?

He combined attributes I have mentioned, and these are too often kept apart. He had the mind of an engineer and systems thinker who also understood people. He was an innovator, but never for its own sake.

He was highly analytical, yet decisive. He planned meticulously, yet adapted when circumstances changed. He pursued success while recognising an obligation to minimise unnecessary loss of life.

Perhaps most importantly, he understood that leadership was not about personally performing every task. It was about designing and coordinating a system in which thousands of people could succeed together — a distinction that translates remarkably well into contemporary leadership.

The Monash Method

So, if we summarise the Monash Method into its 8 aspects it is:

Vision → Courage → Understand the system → Collaboration → Integrity → Planning, Execution and Accountability→ Communication→ Learning.

What does this mean for the leaders of today and tomorrow?

For a modern Australian leader, that might mean approaching health care, energy transition or AI the way Monash approached complex military operations: define the objective clearly; understand the interconnected system in which it operates; assemble the right expertise; use technology intelligently; coordinate stakeholders; anticipate risks; and execute with discipline — while continuing to learn from failure as much as from success.

Now that you have the keys to the Monash Method, I want to leave you with my favourite of his quotes. I genuinely keep it on my fridge at home, because I am passionate about education and life-long learning and believe it is what every Australian leader should aspire to:

"Equip yourself for life, not solely for your own benefit, but for the benefit of the whole community.”

Thank you.

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