The life of Winston Churchill -- as a thought leader and a man of action -- is enormously comforting in these times. Churchill usually is thought of as the inspiring prime minister of Great Britain during World War II.

He also is revered for his visionary writings and speeches during the 1930s, in which he repeatedly warned Western democracies about the dangers of appeasing Hitler's Germany and the absurdity of projecting their own reasonableness on an entirely unreasonable enemy.

But Churchill rarely is discussed as a manager, and this is a shame. "Churchill on Leadership: Executive Success in the Face of Adversity," a small jewel of a book by Steven Hayward, explains why.

Churchill's historical image is of a brave and brilliant eccentric: his malicious wit, afternoon naps, wanderings around FDR's White House in a nightgown and light imbibing of alcohol throughout the day.

Churchill's government career spanned an astonishingly long period for a leader in a democracy, from his election to Parliament in 1900 to his last year as prime minister in 1955. From 1905 to 1955, he held a variety of cabinet-level posts in nearly every area of the British government.

Hayward outlines some of the principles that made Churchill such an effective executive:

• Combine responsibility and authority. Churchill learned the hard way, when heading the disastrous Dardanelles expedition of World War I (described in the Mel Gibson movie "Gallipoli"). Thereafter, he favored what we today would call the "flattened organization."

• Learn from mistakes. Churchill was a risk-taker who sometimes made major blunders. When he did, he used his energy to learn from mistakes, not defend them. He sought out facts and was open to new ideas in most matters.

• Focus and empower employees. Churchill's management style sounds like a human-resource executive's best practices: establish goals before making hiring decisions, choose unconventional talents over seniority, give clear direction, establish trust and back up your people through thick and thin.

• Balance strategy and detail. Churchill adhered to what decades later would be a key tenet of total quality management. He insisted that an organization be structured well enough to run itself day-to-day. An executive's role is to innovate strategically, based on a detailed knowledge of the organization.

Remarkably, he also preached that documenting and quantifying processes was critical to improving performance. In 1917, he wrote: "The recording of action and the circulation of information of all kinds, constitute a sphere second only in importance to decisions."

• Innovation is not enough. Successful innovation depends on focus and execution, not just creativity. Like Peter Drucker (whom he admired), Churchill did not attempt to use creativity to avoid disciplined effort.

Disciplined Eccentric

Churchill was a major technology innovator in military affairs. He drove the invention or adoption of the tank, oil-fueled ships and radar, among other technologies.

Yet despite his creativity, he insisted on discipline in applying technology. In Churchill's "The Second World War: The Gathering Storm," he made a powerful observation about process integration being more important than technology.

Discussing the British radar defense systems that proved critical to defending against German invasion during the Battle of Britain, he wrote: "The Germans had developed a technically efficient radar system which was in some respects ahead of our own [but] we had turned our discoveries to practical effect, and woven all into our general air defense system. In this we led the world, and it was operational efficiency, rather than novelty of equipment, that was the British achievement."

He certainly was a knowledge-based executive. He would have understood the current economy well -- the informatics, the forecasting, the making of decisions in the face of ambiguity. He would have seized upon the Internet, given his writing and information orientation.

Churchill in many ways had the qualities that make a great corporate leader managing a large complex organization today -- that of the "Grounded Eccentric." Jack Welch, Bill Gates, Andy Grove and others like them are deeply talented and aggressive. They also are, as their memoirs and biographies show, unusual men -- even eccentric.