Raise your sights.

A new book, Leadership Lessons From the Civil War, uses examples gleaned from what hyperpolite Southerners called The Late Unpleasantness to teach modern managers the best way to crush the competition. Tom Wheeler, a former CEO of a software company who runs a cellular-phone industry association, compares strategies and tactics of the likes of Lee and Grant to those of Craig McCaw, Ted Turner and other corporate commanders who have emerged victors from many a boardroom bloodbath.

After thumbing through the thin volume, it struck me that Wheeler had overlooked one of the best management lessons the war had to offer. I call it: The Wrong Way to Tell a Superior You Disagree; or Best Not Piss Off the Boss.

From all accounts, Nathan Bedford Forrest was a difficult man to work for. Born dirt poor, he made his first million before he turned 40, trading livestock and slaves. With no military training -- and less than a year of schooling -- he rose through the Confederate ranks, from private to lieutenant general. Fierce and fearless, he was wounded four times, had 29 horses shot out from under him and killed 30 men in hand-to-hand combat.

Then as now, if there's anything more dangerous than a hot-headed general, it's a young lieutenant. In 1863, one by the name of Andrew Wills Gould had the misfortune to lose two cannon in a federal counterattack. Forrest signed orders to have him transferred. As Andrew Nelson Lytle relates in his 1931 classic, Bedford Forrest and His Critter Company, Gould confronted Forrest in his headquarters in Columbia, Tenn., demanding to know why. Forrest wouldn't say -- but made it clear Gould would never serve under him again. Believing his honor had been blighted, Gould pulled a pistol from an inner pocket of his duster and fired.

The ball smashed into the general's right hip and through his abdomen. Forrest, who had been absently twirling a pocketknife in his right hand, grabbed Gould's gun hand with his left. Raising the knife to his teeth, he tore open the blade, then stabbed Gould in the belly and ripped. Gould finally did something smart: He dropped the gun and ran. Forrest walked into a nearby doctor's office and dropped his pants. In those days, getting gut-shot was almost always fatal.

"No damn man can kill me and live," Forrest bellowed. Gushing blood with every step, he ran into the street, snatched a revolver and headed for a shop where Gould was stretched out on the counter, bleeding even worse. Hearing his commander coming for him, he jumped out a window. Forrest fired. Gould fell. "You have killed him, General," someone said.

He had, even though he'd missed. The pocketknife had slashed Gould's bowels. Septic peritonitis set in. Days passed, and as the end neared, they brought the recovering Forrest's cot and placed it near Gould's bed. "General," he said, "I shall not be here long, and I was not willing to go away without seeing you in person and saying to you how thankful I am that I am the one who is to die and that you are spared to the country."

Forrest, "weeping like a child," forgave him, even apologizing for doing him in. The clueless Gould, whose chances for survival in a corporate culture probably wouldn't have been any better than in a martial one, finally got it right. He learned the lesson that has advanced the career of many a mediocrity: It pays to suck up.

David Kinney