Leadership Lessons from Books I Have Read

The collective wisdom, knowledge and experience from the pages of fifty books

Tshilidzi Marwala

• Publisher: Tracey McDonald Publishers
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781776260935
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Liderazgo

'Professor Marwala has sought to understand what good leadership should mean by drawing on the collective experience of authors who have written on many topics.' – Former President of South Africa, THABO MBEKI

We cannot underestimate how critical strong leadership is in all aspects of our lives. It enables us to run our lives, homes, communities, workplaces and nations. Given its importance, it is pertinent to ask: What is the source of good leadership?

Albert Einstein once said, 'The only source of knowledge is experience.' Many philosophers have observed this and, if we accept experience as the only source of knowledge, can we extend this conclusion to leadership? Or is the basis of good leadership intuition or instinct? Or is it perhaps a combination of these?

In Leadership Lessons From Books I Have Read, Tshilidzi Marwala adopts the thesis that the source of good leadership is knowledge, and the source of knowledge is experience, which can take many forms: reading widely, listening, and engaging in discussion and debate with other knowledge seekers.

If leadership is derived from knowledge and knowledge is derived from experience, the 'experience' in this book is from 50 books that Tshilidzi has read, and so the source of knowledge informing leadership is the collective experience of the more than 50 accomplished authors who wrote those books including, among others, Chinua Achebe, Thomas Sankara, NoViolet Bulawayo, Nelson Mandela, Mandla Mathebula, Eugène Marais, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Daniel Kahneman, Karl Marx, Ng?g? wa Thiong'o, Nassim Taleb and Aristotle.

Divided into four sections, Tshilidzi shares his leadership lessons in the areas of Africa and the diaspora, the search for the ideal polity, science, technology and society, and the leadership of nations.

'Those who do not read, should not lead.' – THILIDZI MARWALA

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

We cannot underestimate how critical strong leadership is in all aspects of our lives. It enables us to run our lives, homes, communities, workplaces and nations. Given its importance, it is pertinent to ask what the source of good leadership is. Albert Einstein once said, ‘The only source of knowledge is experience.’ Einstein was articulating what was already known as empiricism. Many philosophers had already observed this, including Kanada in India and Aristotle in Greece. If we accept experience as the only source of knowledge, can we extend this conclusion to leadership? Or is the basis of good leadership intuition or instinct? Or is it perhaps a combination of these?

Leadership Lessons from Books I Have Read adopts the thesis that the source of good leadership is knowledge, and the source of knowledge is experience. Experience can take the form of reading, listening and engaging in discussion. The experience I describe in this book is drawn from 50 books that I have read. Thus, the source of knowledge informing leadership is, in this instance, the collective experiences of more than 50 authors who wrote these books.

The book is divided into four sections. The first section is derived from books that come from Africa and the diaspora, areas which require a great deal of good leadership. Modernisation in Africa has had a bumpy ride. Colonisation and slavery both devastated the African continent and her people. When African countries gained independence, beginning in the 1950s, it was to be yet another bumpy ride. The continent had to navigate the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States (US), and many countries found out first hand that powerful nations will act to maximise their own interests, and coups d’etat instigated from the outside left a lasting impact on the DNA of governance in Africa. African democracy tends to vacillate between optimism and pessimism, with new governments betraying the people soon after they are inaugurated.

I begin this section with Joseph Conrad’s depiction of the exploitation of the former Belgian Congo by the greed of King Leopold II. Conrad is a controversial figure, and some consider his work to be racially insensitive. The truth is that he was describing the colonisation of the Congo, which was inherently violent and racist. Next I discuss Chinua Achebe’s masterpiece Things Fall Apart. In the COVID-19 era, which began in late 2019, things certainly look as though they are falling apart, making Achebe’s novel an apt point of departure. Given the challenges that confront us, and our failure to tackle them, Ayi Kwei Armah’s classic The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born poses the question: are the ‘beautyful’ ones still not yet born? To germinate the ‘beautyful’ ones and birth a dynamic nation, we need to change our mindset. The next books discussed are Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind as well as The Perfect Nine, followed by Thomas Sankara’s Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle. African liberation will never be fully realised until women are liberated from patriarchy. Beloved by Toni Morrison is about the effect of the trans-Atlantic slave trade which had a profound impact on the African continent, making it poor, and on the Americas, making them, and particularly North America rich. In A Handbook of the Venda Language I discuss the Venda language, which is a composite of the Nguni, Sotho and Shona languages infused with words and sounds from the Great Lakes countries.

Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom reveals that Mandela acted not as an individual but as part of the collective. He represents a generation that included Govan Mbeki, Walter Sisulu, and Oliver Tambo as well as the lesser known Andrew Mlangeni who is the subject of The Backroom Boy. As Heraclitus put it, ‘No man ever steps in the same river twice…’ We encountered the Mandela generation once, and that is it. The collective he embodied was probably the closest we came to encountering ‘the beautyful ones’. Since the Mandela generation is past, we now need to forge a new path for a just society on our own. In Unbowed we look at climate change through the eyes of Nobel Prize Laureate Wangari Maathai. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s two books Americanah and Purple Hibiscus and NoViolet Bulawayo’s book We Need New Names are stories of wandering Africans who are disappointed by the failed project of a liberated Africa but inspired by the opportunities of globalisation amid a backlash of hyper-nationalism. This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga describes the anatomy of a decaying country, Zimbabwe. Africa’s Business Revolution is on the enormous opportunities that Africa presents.

The second section of this book is on searching for the ideal polity. I discuss Plato’s The Republic and use some ideas to theorise about how to build resilient countries. This would naturally entail building ethical democracies based on virtues, as Aristotle’s Politics explains. However, establishing this Republic requires understanding the mechanisms of undermining democracies and How to Win an Election by Cicero is turned to next. Furthermore, we need to understand how to build a social contract between the government and its citizens. Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince is an important reference on what power is and how to wield it for a particular end. Here, it is essential to study lessons from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract. But such a contract cannot be achieved if we are stuck in an era of superstition. It is vital that, as the African continent, we attain our era of enlightenment. The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine helps us navigate this transition. The role of religion in development is an essential consideration in the context of the African continent because the African continent is rapidly becoming more religious.

I discuss three books on the French Revolution: A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, The Twelve Who Ruled by Robert Roswell Palmer and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx. Palmer and Dickens show how revolutions descend into violence, while Marx elucidates how conflict between different classes can lead to revolutions. Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism discusses how a particular event in Western Christianity, the Reformation, has been instrumental in developing capitalism. Two books that show how free and open societies can be undermined by state violence are The Open Society and its Enemies by Karl Popper and George Orwell’s 1984. Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil reveals how evil can arise in ordinary men. Finally, Caste by Isabel Wilkerson discusses how the caste system has shaped societies in India, the United States and South Africa.

The themes in the third section are science, technology and society. I begin with The Soul of the White Ant by Eugène Marais which describes intelligence from the termite’s perspective. Then I look at The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn which describes how scientific revolutions manifest themselves, and introduces the phrase ‘the paradigm shift’ into the English language. Irrational Exuberance by Robert Shiller discusses how enthusiasm can cloud our rationality and affect how we participate in markets and politics. In Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond proposes that guns, germs and steel enabled conquest that led to colonisation. Next I discuss Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. ‘Nudging’ is a process of getting people to behave in a certain way without them realising it. Deep Fakes by Nina Schick explains how an AI technique called the Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can be used to generate fake people. In this way videos and pictures can be altered to achieve a particular political agenda. The impact of this on ‘freedom, liberty and prosperity’ is far reaching.

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman discusses how human thinking can lead to irrational decisions. Homo Deus by Yuval Harari is about the future of humanity when humans turn into gods able to augment intelligence and other attributes associated with gods. The Amazon Way on IoT by John Rossman is on the Internet of Things. Things are connected via the internet; for example, clothes and other wearables are connected to the internet, allowing them to monitor people’s health and communicate the information directly to doctors. Deep Medicine by Eric Topol looks at how AI can be used in the medical field to augment and, in many instances, replace health workers such as doctors. Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom deals with how the capability of AI will increase and evolve and the implications this evolution will have on the future of humanity. Profiles in Corruption by Peter Schweizer examines the corruption of politicians in the United States, especially those who claim to be working on behalf of the people. Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb discusses how randomness can deceive decision makers, with severe consequences. The Economic Singularity by Calum Chace reviews how technological advances enabled by AI will significantly impact economic factors such as production and jobs. Range by David Epstein considers how specialising too early can be disadvantageous compared with specialising later in life. COVID-19 by Michael Mosley describes the need to understand the science of the COVID pandemic and the importance of science in tackling health problems.

The fourth section of the book is on the leadership of nations. In this regard, I study two critical leaders of China, Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping. Through Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China by Ezra Vogel and The Governance of China by Xi Jinping, I interrogate how Deng laid the foundation for modern China and how Xi is taking China to a new era which, it is expected, will lead to China emerging as the largest economy in the world. I also discuss Leadership in Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin, which examines four presidents who led the US in times of great crisis. They are Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. Finally, I look at A Promised Land by Barack Obama.

In the conclusion, I detail 50 leadership lessons I have identified in all the 50 books I have considered.

SECTION A

AFRICA AND THE DIASPORA

This section examines books written on Africa and the diaspora. They were written by, among others, authors such as Joseph Conrad, Chinua Achebe, Ayi Kwei Armah, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Thomas Sankara, Toni Morrison, Nelson Mandela, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and NoViolet Bulawayo. I contextualise these books within the framework of the 4IR and outline leadership lessons that can be drawn from them.

CHAPTER 2

Lessons from
Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad

Princeton University, one of the most prestigious universities in the world, dropped the name Woodrow Wilson from its policy school in 2020.1 Wilson was a celebrated professor who later became President of Princeton and the Governor of New Jersey, before becoming the 28th President of the United States. But Wilson was perhaps best known for enforcing racial discrimination in the public service. Princeton dropped Wilson’s name 73 years after they honoured him in large part because of the anti-racism movement that gripped the world after the brutal murder of George Floyd in 2020. This movement grew so substantially that statues of men who were once enslavers and colonisers fell. For example, the University of Oxford agreed to remove the statue of Cecil John Rhodes who pillaged Southern Africa through violence and murder.

The Charleston City Council in South Carolina voted to remove the statue of the former US Vice-President John Calhoun who was one of the confederate leaders who fought in the American Civil War to protect the system of enslaving African Americans. It is estimated that he owned around 80 slaves. The statue of another confederate, Johnny Reb, was also removed in Virginia. Other statues of confederate leaders who faced a similar fate include Jefferson Davis and Charles Linn. These statues were removed either because authorities had voted for their removal or the Black Lives Matter activists forcibly removed them.

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