How to Analyze Spanish Conquest of Inca Empire?

Case Type: HR/organizational behavior; operations strategy.
Consulting Firm: PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) final round job interview.
Industry Coverage: Consulting, HR, Business Services.

Case Interview Question #00162: In the 16th century, Spanish explorer and conqueror Francisco Pizarro, together with an army of 106 foot-soldiers and 62 horsemen, defeated the Inca Empire of 80,000 soldiers South America. Characteristics of the Inca people are:

• they were rich, and they had mastered the art of making gold and handicrafts.
• they had agriculture, but no way of storing food for long.
• they regarded their king as a god, the child of the Sun god.
• there had recently been civil war among the Incas and the brother of the king had led an uprising against the king.

How would you draw parallels between this historical incident and modern corporate operations in terms of strategy, IT, HR, marketing and finance?

Possible Answers:

Financing: Getting cash from the King and Queen of Spain. Queen Isabel, in the absence of her husband King Charles I, signed a grant of license which authorized Francisco Pizarro to proceed with the conquest of Peru.

Human Resources: Recruiting and motivating the soldiers and sailors. One of the conditions of the grant was that within six months Pizarro should raise a sufficiently equipped force of 250 men. When Pizarro’s expedition was ready, it numbered three ships, 180 men (including several of his relatives), and 27 horses.

Technology Advantage: Leveraging diverse technologies from gun-power to navigation. Contemporary accounts by members of Pizarro’s force explain how the Spanish forces used a cavalry charge against the Inca forces, who had never seen horses, in combination with gunfire from cover (the Inca forces had never encountered guns before). Other factors in the Spaniard’s favor were their steel swords, helmets and armor, against the Inca forces which only had leather armor and were unarmed. The Spanish also had 4 small cannons commanded by a Greek artillery captain which were used to great effect in the crowded Inca town square.

IT/Knowledge Transfer: Pizarro learned from Hernan Cortes and other explorers. The Incas did not have a written language, so knowledge transfer was difficult.

Marketing: Playing one Incan faction off against the other faction. Pizarro and his men were greatly aided in their enterprise by the fact that they arrived when the Inca Empire was in the midst of a war of succession between two princes.

Operations Strategy: The first target of the Spanish attack was the Inca Emperor and his top commanders. Once these had been killed or captured the Inca forces were disorganized as the commanding structure of the army had been effectively decapitated.