TIME magazine managing editor Richard Stengel features leadership lessons from one of history’s living legends. Stengel profiles Nelson Mandela, who turns 90 years old July 18 and provides the global icon’s eight lessons of leadership for the U.S. presidential candidates.
The lessons are from Stengel’s work on Mandela’s auto biography Long Walk to Freedom. Of Mandela, he writes, “As we enter the main stretch of a historic presidential campaign in America, there is much that he can teach the two candidates. In my mind, I’ve always thought of these as Madiba’s Rules (Madiba, his clan name, is what everyone close to him calls him), and they are cobbled together from our conversations old and new and from watching him from up close and afar. They are mostly practical. Many of them stem directly from his personal experience. All of them are calibrated to make the best kind of trouble—the trouble that forces us to ask how we can make the world a better place.”
Mandela’s eight lessons of leadership:
1. Courage is not the absence of fear—it’s inspiring others to move beyond it: “Prisoners who were with him said that watching Mandela walk across the courtyard, upright and proud, was enough to keep them going for days. He knew that he was a model for others, and that gave him the strength to triumph over his own fear.”
2. Lead from the front—but don’t leave your base behind
3. Lead from the back—and let others believe they are in front: “The trick of leadership is allowing yourself to be led, too. ‘It is wise,’ he said, ‘to persuade people to do things and make them think it was their own idea.’”
4. Know your enemy—and learn about his favorite sport
5. Keep your friends close—and your rivals even closer: “Mandela believed that bringing his rivals in was a way of controlling them: they were more dangerous on their own than within his circle of influence.”
6. Appearances matter—and remember to smile: “For white South Africans, the smile symbolized Mandela’s lack of bitterness and suggested that he was sympathetic to them. To black voters, it said, I am the happy warrior, and we will triumph.”
7. Nothing is black or white: “Mandela’s calculus was always, What is the end that I seek, and what is the most practical way to get there?”
8. Quitting is leading, too: “In the history of Africa, there have been only a tiny handful of democratically elected leaders who willingly stood down from office. Mandela was determined to set a precedent for all who followed him—not only in South Africa but across the rest of the continent.”
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1821467,00.html
