Paths of Glory

Cobb's 1935 novel reconstructs the 1915 Souain court-martial, in which French soldiers were executed not for cowardice but to satisfy a general's need to deflect blame for a failed assault.

The book is a clinical anatomy of how hierarchical institutions manufacture accountability downward while protecting authority upward—a dynamic that digital product leaders encounter whenever a roadmap failure is absorbed by teams rather than sponsors.

Cobb shows that organisational violence is rarely personal; it is structural, procedural, and self-legitimating, conducted through the very processes designed to ensure fairness.

For anyone directing products inside large organisations, this is essential reading on how decision authority and consequence accountability become systematically decoupled.

The novel predates Kubrick's film by two decades but carries the same cold precision: systems optimised for command are not optimised for truth, and the gap between the two is where people are destroyed.