Mandela's Way: Lessons on Life, Love, and Courage

"Nelson Mandela had many great teachers, but the greatest of them all was prison." Having grabbed the reader's attention with this sentence in the book's introduction, author Richard Stengel illustrates how Mandela's response to his circumstances during 27 years in prison enabled him to rise above them, to influence those around him, and ultimately to free him and transform his country. Stengel, executive editor of Time magazine, and Mandela's official biographer, drew from his previous works on Mandela to assemble this short, engaging book of lessons on leadership, self-mastery, and intentional living from one of the most transformational leaders of our time. "Mandela's Way" is not another biography. Stengel provides only enough information about Mandela as a young man to show the contrast between the 44-year-old who was sent to prison for life, and the 71-year-old who walked out of prison to transform South Africa and become its President. Oliver Tambo, the head of the African National Congress during Mandela's imprisonment, described the younger Mandela as "passionate, emotional, sensitive, quickly stung to bitterness and retaliation by insult and patronage." Although his tremendous, innate gifts and his upbringing in his tribe's royal court are factors in who Mandela became, he is, more than anything, a product of his own integrity - his character, self-discipline, and strong will. When prodded to say how prison changed him, a reluctant Mandela answered tersely: "I became mature." The first thing Mandela learned in prison, Stengel says, is self-control. Rather than become bitter or defeated, he chose to learn from and then to shape circumstances for himself and his fellow prisoners, while never giving up his goal of overcoming Apartheid. Not all the book is focused on Mandela's time in prison. Stengel describes what management books would call Mandela's "executive style." Although educated in Western management theory, Mandela rejects aspects of it that, in his view, do not work. Instead, he prefers the role model provided by the tribal chief who was his mentor, the African model best described as "ubuntu": each of us is human only in relation to others; people empower each other; and we become our best selves only through our unselfish interactions with each other. In the tribal culture of Mandela's upbringing, the chief sees himself as a servant whose office is both his calling and his privilege. This is hardly the philosophy behind most MBA curricula. But the most instructive, interesting passages are those describing how Mandela spent his years of incarceration, especially when one considers he had little hope of ever getting out. He kept a daily exercise routine in his cell - running in place for 45 minutes followed by pushups and sit-ups. Even now, in his nineties, Mandela often walks for three or four hours, starting at 4:30 in the morning, his decades-younger bodyguards often struggling to keep up. In prison, his self-imposed ac

This is a must read for all. If you have followed Mr. Mandela and his history, you will really enjoy reading this book. There are lessons to be learned from this reading. I have included some of the lessons in my way of life and it works for me.

I enjoyed reading this book. The "lessons" are not earth-shattering, but they are interesting--especially when illustrated by anecdotes from Mandela's life. I like that Stengel gives a balanced view of Mandela. He is respectful and clearly fond of Mandela, but doesn't make the man out to be a messiah. I do feel like the book dissolved into blah, filler chapters toward the end, but I still finished it. And I would recommend the book to others looking to learn a bit about Mandela. Obviously, for a more thorough biography of Mandela, _Long Walk to Freedom_ is the way to go. Overall, an interesting, quick read.

What would Nelson Mandela do? Toward the end of Mandela's Way, Richard Stengel asks this question. Stengel helped Mandela write his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, in the early 1990s, and this question helped him "internalize [Mandela] and his ideas." Mandela's Way is biographical, but with a moral point. How can reflecting on the life of Nelson Mandela help us live? The tradition of biography as moral exercise is as old as the Greeks and Romans, not to mention Jews and Christians, but it has taken new form with the uniquely American literary genre of Leadership Secrets of X, usually some famous person. When I picked up Mandela's Way, I was hoping for the older form of the tradition but worried that I would get the newer one. Few things are more aggravating than the simplification of a person's life for the purpose of making the reader a better businessman. Stengel, thankfully, did not disappoint me. As a college student in the late 80s and early 90s, I was aware of Mandela and the struggle of the African National Congress and others to end South African apartheid. I knew little about the man, however. Mandela's Way is an excellent introduction to his life and struggle, presented thematically rather than chronologically. If one metric of a book's quality is that it inspires you to read more on the subject, then this book is quite successful. The subtitle of Stengel's book is Fifteen Lessons on Life, Love and Courage. My guess is that Stengel's publisher came up with this verbiage, as a nod to the newer form of moral biography. The lessons are simple--"Courage is not the absence of fear," "Lead from the front," "Lead from the back," etc.--without being simplistic. The way Stengel achieves this is by rooting each lesson in the context of Mandela's life, struggle, and self-reflection. Prison dominates the narrative. Mandela spent three decades in South African prison. It molded him as a man and as a leader. It also cost him personally in many ways. Stengel takes measure of both the good and the bad in his portrait of Mandela's life. What emerges is a man who is morally tough, politically pragmatic--except on the all-important issue of a racially just South Africa, and personally resilient. Mandela's story inspired me. "What would Nelson Mandela do?" reflects, whether consciously or not, a phrase popularized by American evangelicals: "What would Jesus do?" As a Christian and as a pastor, what strikes me is the absence of religion in Mandela's life. He is, according to Stengel, "a materialist in the philosophical sense." He believes that there is "no destiny that shapes our end; we shape it ourselves." Of course, he aligned with religious leaders such as Bishop Desmond Tutu, but without sharing their faith. And of course, the Afrikaner architects of apartheid were the progeny of the South African Reformed churches. Which leads to this irony: Opponents of apartheid asked "What would Nelson Mandela do?" precisely because its proponents d

In the introduction is an engrossing description of the complex personality and personal habits of Nelson Mandela. The writing is flowing and exceptionally easy to read. When I got to the end of the book, I realized why: The author is the editor of Time magazine. "I've never known a human being who can be as still as Nelson Mandela," writes Richard Stengel in the introduction. "When he is sitting and listening, he does not tap his fingers or his foot, or move about. He has no nervous tics. When I have adjusted his tie or smoothed his jacket or fixed a microphone on his lapel, it was like fussing with a statue. When he listens to you, it is as though you were looking at a still photograph of him. You would barely know he was breathing." Mandela's personality is complex and seemingly contradictory. He is still but he's also "a power charmer -- confident that he will charm you, by whatever means possible," writes Stengel. "He is attentive, courtly, winning, and, to use a word he would hate, seductive. And he works at it. He will learn as much as he can about you before meeting you." The book is rich with telling anecdotes from Mandela's fascinating career to illustrate the fifteen lessons. Stengel had a lot of material to choose from. He worked with Mandela on his autobiography for nearly three years and "during much of that time," wrote Stengel, "I saw him almost every day. I traveled with him, ate with him, tied his shoes, straightened his tie -- and spent hours and hours in conversation with him about his life and work..." With all this firsthand experience of Mandela, Stengel was privy to an untold number of insights into successful living. Mandela spent 27 years in prison and while he was there, he pondered how to behave, how to be a leader, and how to be a good human being. By the time he was released, he was a living library of hard-won wisdom. Mandela is genuinely courageous, as he has proven many times over his lifetime. But luckily for us he is also honest, and he revealed what may be to many a surprising truth about his courage: It was all an act. According to Mandela, courage -- real, genuine courage -- consists of nothing more than "pretending to be brave." Fearlessness is stupidity, he says. This book is both a biography and a self-help book -- one of the best self-help books I've ever read. I'm the author of the book, "Self-Help Stuff That Works," so I'm no stranger to the genre. Mandela not only has an admirable personal philosophy, but he has been exceedingly effective in the real world. And these fifteen lessons are key components of his success. One of them, "see the good in others," is a good example. "Some call it a blind spot," wrote Stengel, "others naiveté, but Mandela sees almost everyone as virtuous until proven otherwise. He starts with an assumption that you are dealing with him in good faith. He believes that, just as pretending to be brave can lead to acts of real bravery, seeing the good in other people improves