Meg Whitman Jolts HP As Its Reluctant Savior

To understand Meg Whitman, the formereBay chief executive who now runs Hewlett-Packard, it’s essential to revisit something she did 26 years ago. She had just become a junior partner at Bain Consulting, working for the brilliant but domineering Tom Tierney. One morning Whitman walked into his office, impromptu. The 31-year-old asked her feared boss if he wanted staff feedback about his leadership style; he nodded. With that Whitman grabbed a felt-tip marker and sketched a giant steamroller on a nearby flip board. “This is you, Tom,” she explained. “You’re too pushy–you’re not letting us build consensus leadership.”
Tierney was stunned. But he eventually absorbed the message and toned down his stridency. All of Bain benefited. “There was a real courage to her,” recalls Tierney. “What she told me was a gift. Even though her feedback was negative and unsolicited, it left me liking Meg more.”
Jump ahead to last year, soon after a boardroom uprising brought Whitman to power as HP’s chief executive. She stepped into a mess: HP’s stock had tumbled 42% in the year before she took office, while operating margins had sunk to just 2.5%. Archrival Dell was gaining ground in the server market, and HP seemed powerless to stop it. When the two computer makers vied for a $350 million server order from Microsoft’s Bing search engine team in April 2012, Dell won the job. Familiar story: Bing’s previous four face-offs had all gone Dell’s way, too.
Whitman refused to shrug off defeat. Within minutes she was on the phone to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, demanding the same candor she once offered Tierney. “Tell me where we came up short,” Whitman asked. “Don’t sugarcoat it. I’d like to know so that we can do better the next time.” Soon afterward Microsoft sent a multipage memo to Whitman, listing nine ways that HP had fumbled its opportunity. “Even if your bid had been price-competitive, you wouldn’t have won,” a Microsoft lieutenant declared.
For Whitman the memo wasn’t an insult; it was a battle plan. She convened a war team of HP’s enterprise computing chief, Dave Donatelli; the company’s operations chief, John Hinshaw; and supply chain wizard Tony Prophet. Their job: figure out how to make HP more competitive. Match Dell’s ability to suggest cost-saving steps that hadn’t occurred to Microsoft. Done. Promise to fix software bugs in two days, not four weeks. HP was on it. By summer HP had crafted a far more customer-friendly approach. When Bing bought a further $530 million of servers in January, vindication arrived. This time HP, not Dell, seized the order.
Blunt, folksy and persistent, Meg Whitman is the leader that Hewlett-Packard desperately needs. She’s decisive without being abrasive, persuasive without being slick. She’s a team builder who knows that turnarounds call for repairing hundreds of small failings rather than betting everything on a miracle cure that might be a mirage. In the words of HP director Marc Andreessen, one of Silicon Valley’s top venture capitalists, “She’s the best CEO the company has had since its founders.”
But fixing the world’s biggest tech company–with $120 billion in annual revenue and 330,000 employees–is a herculean task. Bloated by more than 70 acquisitions in the past 15 years, HP isn’t just sprawling and stalled out; it may actually be running in reverse. Revenue has been shrinking for most of the past seven quarters. HP’s return on capital is a pitiful 7% over the past five years. (By comparison, IBM is at 29%, and even Dell, which has its own troubles, is at 24%.) HP is still profitable before its enormous asset writedowns, but with its stock trading at a feeble price/earnings multiple of six, one major investor suggests HP can’t totally shake the fear that it might go to zero.
Too gruesome for Whitman’s tastes? Guess again. “Problems are good, as long as you solve them quickly,” says Whitman over a Cobb salad lunch at HP’s facilities, now chockablock with posters of Whitman’s favorite sayings, including this aphorism: “Run to the fire; don’t hide from it.” “Meg thrives on these sorts of challenges,” says Howard Schultz, the Starbucks CEO and a longtime friend who has known her since their time together on the eBay board.
When Whitman took command 20 months ago, following her own hiccup–a personally expensive thumping in the 2010 election for governor of California–she walked into a company that had squeezed out its previous four CEOs. In 1999 genial insider Lew Platt didn’t deliver enough sizzle, charismatic marketer Carly Fiorina couldn’t hit earnings targets in 2005, and hard-nosed numbers guy Mark Hurd got tangled up in an expense-account scandal in 2010. Whitman’s immediate predecessor, aloof European import L?o Apotheker, lasted just 11 months. His undoing: ill-advised strategic thrusts that sent HP’s stock crashing.
Nobody on HP’s board wanted the hazards of trying to pick and train another total outsider. Internal candidates were scarce. So in August 2011, as Apotheker’s stormy tenure neared its end, directors began to coalesce around Whitman as their best choice. She had been a successful Silicon Valley CEO. She had joined the HP board in January 2011 and was well aware of the company’s challenges. And with Jerry Brown ensconced in the governor’s mansion in Sacramento, she was available for a new full-time job.
One problem: Whitman didn’t want the gig. She told HP directors Raj Gupta and Andreessen that she would be busy enough with board work, private equity and perhaps an appointed political post. “I’m done running companies,” she told one board member. But on a private-jet flight back to the Bay Area after an HP board meeting, other directors began lobbying her. They invoked HP’s extraordinary heritage as Silicon Valley’s first garage startup, begun in 1939 by engineers Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. They talked about how important HP was to the California economy and as a global symbol of innovation.

“Suddenly the conversation changed to what she might do if she took the job,” Andreessen recalls. “I saw this twinkle in her eye. And I said to myself: ‘I think we got her.’ ”
THE TECH SECTOR, Whitman well knows, is unusually stingy with second chances. Fall behind and you die. The two great exceptions date back to the 1990s: Steve Jobs’ resurrection of Apple and Lou Gerstner’s transformation of IBM. Asked about those templates, the 56-year-old Whitman quickly rules out a Jobs comparison. “Steve was the business genius of our generation,” she says. “It’s hard for anyone to emulate him.” Besides, no magical iPod or iPhone beckons in HP’s future. The Gerstner turnaround, by contrast, “is probably more relevant,” she says.
Like the outsider who got Big Blue back on track, Whitman started her first board meeting as CEO in October 2011 by declaring: “Rule number one is to fix what we have.” She reversed Apotheker’s plans to sell off the PC business at what would have likely been a fire-sale price. She believed that business could be fixed, especially if it focused harder on the booming market for tablets and other mobile devices. And she stuck with Apotheker’s proposed purchase of British software company Autonomy for $11 billion, which backfired.
To keep things simple, Whitman has arranged HP into two clusters. One grouping aims at corporate tech customers, led by Donatelli’s enterprise hardware shop. Its servers, storage and networking delivered 43% of overall operating profits in the most recent quarter. In theory all this iron and silicon should be buttressed by adjoining software and services divisions. But when it comes to software acquisitions, Autonomy was merely the most high-profit misstep. All told, over the past decade HP squandered nearly $19 billion to buy myriad outfits that contribute only 7% to overall profit. The services unit, which staffs other companies’ tech projects, is barely at break-even. It is trying to rebuild after an $8 billion writedown last August.
HP’s other cluster sells printers, PCs, laptops and mobile devices, chiefly to consumers worldwide. Unfortunately for Whitman, the days of being able to rely on the lucrative printer business for outsize profits are over. (In 2002 printing actually contributed 104% of HP’s total operating profits because everything else was below break-even; today that contribution is only 29%.) Corporations still buy lots of printers and ink, but consumers’ appetites have dimmed. The likes of Google, Facebook and Dropbox have facilitated a burgeoning era of ink-free photo- and document-sharing.
To get both of HP’s legacy businesses moving, Whitman started by overhauling how the company sells. Internal surveys showed that HP’s more than 20,000 salespeople rated their own in-house sales tools at about a 7–on a scale of 1 to 100. It took HP as long as three weeks to work up a price quote on a complex order. Competitors could do the same in a few days. Many customers chafed. Others just looked elsewhere. When Whitman’s operations chief, John Hinshaw, recommended yanking out Oracle’s aging Siebel sales software in favor of new salesforce.com tools, she gave him the go-ahead to get the company converted as fast as possible. HP’s price-quote queue has shrunk 75%, while those internal metrics have soared into the 70s. Sellers’ ulcers are gone, and customer rapport is on the mend.
Along with timelier terms, HP’s customers need reassurance that the company knows what it it’s doing. At the end of the Apotheker era, “We were quite concerned that HP wasn’t well glued together,” recalls Dana Deasy, group chief information officer at oil giant BP.

So Whitman hit the road. In the past year she has held a staggering 305 one-on-one meetings with customers or sales-channel partners, aides say, as well as another 42 roundtable chats with small groups. A peek at her calendar the past 60 days shows trips to Munich, London, Brazil, India, New York and Bentonville, Ark., the home of Wal-Mart. “She’s made herself more available than her predecessor ever did,” says Chris Case, president of Sequel Data Systems in Austin, Tex.
Jim Fortner, an IT executive at Procter & Gamble, says he quizzed Whitman at length last year about HP’s personal computer strategy. He was relieved to get consistent answers. “That’s important for us,” Fortner says. “We buy a lot of PCs.” BP’s Deasy says that during one of Whitman’s London visits, he griped about an HP software installation that wasn’t happening on time. She made some calls and discovered a fractured team that didn’t hold anyone accountable for speedy delivery. The project, Deasy reports, is now back on track.
AS BAIN’S TOM TIERNEY LEARNED the hard way, Meg Whitman is fond of making her points graphically. As I push her on HP’s long-term challenge–how to get her company’s growth engines firing again–she reflexively grabs a sheet of paper. “You’ve got to start launching new products when your existing ones are still growing,” she says. “It is not helpful to start a new product here,” as she points to the downward slope of a sales curve that crested too long ago. The result, Whitman says, “is that we’ve got acorns when we need oak trees.” She can’t make up ground through acquisitions: The stock is too cheap, Wall Street too hostile given the spendthrift track record, and HP is trying to reduce last year’s $5.8 billion operating company debt to zero.
Instead, Whitman needs to heap fertilizer onto those acorns–fast. Products with the most promise include Moonshot servers, which are small, energy-efficient and flexible; 3PAR storage devices, which can go up and down in size without busting budgets; and its inkjet office printers, which match the speed and quality of laser printers at a much lower cost. But even in these areas it’s tough to see marginal revenue growth outpacing the sales deterioration of tired old products.
The acorn/oak tree problem is especially acute in the fast-growing tablet market. HP should dominate, in the same way that it has become the world’s biggest maker of PCs and laptops. But HP’s tablet strategy for years has been a baffling mix of launches and retreats, culminating with Apotheker’s August 2011 decision to kill the TouchPad model introduced just seven weeks earlier.
Belatedly, HP has jumped back into the hunt. Since February new models have been streaming into the market, most notably the Slate 7, priced at $169–less than Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD. More machines are about to hit the market, and tech reviewers have generally liked HP’s efforts so far. Still, once market leaders are set, it’s very hard to barrel past them.
HP faces a similar challenge in the server market. Its ?industry-standard machines, based on Intel chip designs, have been big sellers since the early ’90s. But cutting-edge customers like Google and Rackspace now prefer to build their own servers, arranging parts in the most optimal way for their needs. The new Moonshot server line is attracting interest from banks and energy companies, which like its compact design and ability to run many different types of microprocessors. But the data-crunching tech giants, which buy more servers than anyone, may be gone for good as HP customers.
Previous CEOs hoped that big ad campaigns would make HP seem cool again. Whitman’s brand messaging, centered on the motto “Make It Matter,” seems most likely to bolster the spirits of HP’s workforce. For wooing the public at large she is taking a page out of Jobs’ playbook. “Look at Apple,” says Whitman, referring to its design. “Or look at websites like Zaarly, Path or One Kings Lane. When I got involved in the Internet in the 1990s, websites weren’t beautiful. Now they are. Design is a differentiating characteristic in our markets. We need to take advantage of that.”
So HP now has an overall vice president for design, Stacy Wolff, who oversees a fast-growing 40-person team of recruits from the likes of BMW, Nokia and Frog Design. A new, big-screen, all-in-one PC has a nifty hinge that holds its tilt at any viewing angle; power buttons on PCs and printers now glow the same pure white; even perforated cooling grilles look sleeker yet more friendly. It’s not quite Apple-elegant, but it no longer looks like metal shop either.
WHITMAN, a Harvard M.B.A. with an economics degree from Princeton, might not have engineering chops or her name on any patents, but unlike HP’s previous three CEOs, she is Silicon Valley informal through and through. When she joined eBay in 1998, the then-tiny auction company was defined by the sweet, New Age-ish values of the company’s founder, Pierre Omidyar: Change the world, have fun, believe that most people are good. Whitman figured out how to combine his vision with big-league business practices that let eBay enjoy sustainable hypergrowth. She worked marathon hours at one stage, rebuilding eBay’s technical team until the site could handle booming traffic without crashing. But she also embraced the jokey, college-dorm atmosphere of an ambitious startup, filling her desk with goofy eBay auction items and dressing up as a witch one Halloween.
So the new HP attitude starts at the front door of its low-slung Palo Alto headquarters. She dumped the barbed wire and locked gates that once separated executive parking spaces from the general lot. “We should enter the building the same way everyone else does,” she says. Once inside Whitman works from a small, sand-colored cubicle. (Her predecessors’ somber office has been turned into a conference room.) Whitman has a swim cap tacked to one partition, a picture of her mom on another. A Thomas Jefferson ?biography tops the heap of books next to her computer. Management tracts reside in the middle, treatises on cloud computing on the bottom. On the road she often settles for a $139 room at the Courtyard Marriott, despite the fact that she’s worth $1.9 billion. “You check in at 10 p.m., and you’re out of there at 7 the next morning,” she shrugs. “It’s not like you’re moving in for a week.” It’s also a painless and visible way to lead by example.
But her tough, hands-on streak, often displayed at eBay and bolstered by two years of taking and throwing vicious political haymakers, comes through when things go wrong. Her printing team’s weak explanation, in a three-hour meeting, of why their business kept falling short of financial goals quickly led to two marathon brainstorming sessions, where she focused on hard-to-spot bad habits like excessive use of rebates. By the time Whitman was done the printing team had a new cap on rebates –and a new division boss to enforce it.
And Whitman has picked a fiercer fight against Autonomy’s original management team. Last November HP took an $8.8 billion charge in connection with that purchase, blaming the setback on “serious accounting improprieties” in Autonomy’s books at the time of sale. Autonomy founder Mike Lynch instantly disputed that claim, blaming HP instead for poorly managing its new acquisition. He declined to comment for this story.
Ongoing arguments have kept the Autonomy mess in the news, but as HP presses authorities in the U.S. and U.K. to investigate fraud claims, its willingness to fight sits a lot better with employees than watching top management shrug off another blunder and hoping it fades from memory. Almost 80% of HP employees at Glassdoor.com, a website packed with anonymous feedback on thousands of companies, say that they have confidence in Whitman, placing her in a tie with IBM’s Virginia Rometty and slightly ahead of corporate stalwarts such as Cisco’s John Chambers (76% ).
Whitman has more work to do to win over Wall Street. She warned investors and her board early on that getting giant HP back on track would be a five-year job, defining 2013 as a “fix and rebuild” year, with no assurances of sustained growth until 2014. When fiscal first-quarter results topped analysts’ scaled-down expectations, she spoke of “a long road ahead.”
If Whitman can lift the doomsday anxiety, HP’s shares could roar ahead. “Meg and the team are delivering everything they said they would,” says Pat Russo, an HP director and the former CEO of Alcatel-Lucent. “We are committed to her.” Adds fellow director Raj Gupta, the former CEO of Rohm & Haas: “As long as she’s enjoying it and the company is on track, the board would like to see her stay as long as she wants.”
Whitman is beyond financial motivation. She’s playing for legacy: “There’s quite a bit of pride in being part of something that means so much to the Valley and to this country. It’s a nice company. Nice people. And I think we’re going to turn this.”

Cause a change

If everybody followed the rules, nothing would ever change. Without change there would be no progress.

Sometimes wonderful changes come about naturally, accidentally or completely out of the blue. But change making doesn’t always happen by chance. You need to have the right environment, tools, support and attitude to become a change maker.

The benefits of change making should be instilled at an early age. Children will be marginalised if they always follow the rules. Kids should be taught to cause a change and deal with change, rather than just leaving schools with loads of facts.


Over 80% of entrepreneurs started something in their teens, including yours truly. We all need to work on making entrepreneurship universal and broadening the opportunities for people to become entrepreneurs. If you haven't created a revolutionary web business by 25 it is unlikely you will - the window for nurturing change makers needs to be widened.

If you surround yourself with creative people who are eager to provoke positive change then you are more likely to do so too. Plus, once you've changed your world once, you'll do it again and again. It is no surprise that many successful inventors, entrepreneurs and creative talents have success in many different fields.

Once a change maker, always a change maker - but only a few swim against the tide.
By Richard Branson. Founder of Virgin Group

Nelson Mandela’s Legend: 7 Leadership Lessons

We’re all aware that Nelson Mandela is critically ill in hospital and close to his passing. It seems a shame we always wait until the inspirational icons are no longer with us, before we start to contemplate and celebrate their legend. In a world where people frequently express their disillusionment with politicians and their inability to make a difference, he’s a shining star. For me, there are seven profound lessons that CEOs and leaders can learn from the great Nelson “Madiba” Mandela:
(1) Master your meaning and your emotions
“I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul,” Mandela still likes to quote from W. E. Henley’s Victorian poem ‘Invictus’. Prepared to go to prison for his political beliefs, Mandela stood tall. When his African National Congress (ANC) had been banned by the apartheid South African government in 1960, Mandela had advocated that the party abandon its policy of non-violence, leading to a sentence of life imprisonment. He said, “I was made, by the law, a criminal, not because of what I had done, but because of what I stood for.”
Reflecting on the moment when he entered Robben Island prison, off the coast of Cape Town, Mandela said, “how you’re treated in prison depends on your demeanor.” Threatened with violence by an Afrikaans prison guard, he told him, “You dare touch me, I will take you to the highest court in the land. And by the time I finish with you, you will be as poor as a church mouse.”
Keeping his emotions in check, relations with his captors improved as he sought to “communicate with them in a message that says I recognize your humanity”. His official biographer Anthony Sampson argues that, during his 27 years in jail, Mandela was able to develop “a philosopher’s detachment,” as well as, “the subtler art of politics: how to relate to all kinds of people, how to persuade and cajole, how to turn his warders into his dependents, and how eventually to become master in his own prison.”
CEOs operate in a much more time-compressed environment, yet should work towards attaining a similar state of Zen-like calm and detachment. In this place, they will not only benefit from better health and wellbeing, but keep sight of the bigger picture and avoid getting buffeted by day-to-day issues.
(2) Treat the losers with dignity and turn them into partners
In 1989, apartheid South Africa suffered from racial violence and a faltering economy at home, while it was shunned abroad. The continuing struggle between the black and white populations seemed like a recipe for mutual destruction, like Israel and Palestine. However, the arrival of new president F.W. de Klerk finally presented Mandela faced with a more pragmatic political opponent, who was minded to free him from prison. For years, Mandela had stood for freedom from oppression. How to approach his captor and would-be liberator? Mandela’s lawyer George Bizos explained the thinking: “Let’s help him. Let’s not keep him in his corner by calling him an oppressor. Even the term can become such a stigma.” Mandela helped de Klerk to, “move from that concept called oppressor to that of a partner”.
Mandela understood that in a negotiation, both sides have to gain. There must be no winners and no losers: the South African people as a whole must win. Learning the lessons from Germany at end of the First World War, he believed, “You mustn’t compromise your principles, but you mustn’t humiliate the opposition. No one is more dangerous than one who is humiliated.”
The process through which Mandela managed to free himself, end apartheid and create a new South African constitution was testament to his tremendous generosity of spirit. George Bizos added that Mandela believed that, “we don’t have to be victims of our past, that we can let go of our bitterness, and that all of us can achieve greatness… he did it not through beating anybody down; most people wouldn’t have the forgiveness to do that sort of thing.”
(3) Shift perspectives through symbolism and shared experiences
Through his example and presence, Mandela has always led from the front. Like Gandhi or Churchill, he learned early how to build up and understand his own image. His trademark colorful shirts mirror his exuberance and optimism while reflecting his tribal roots. The 1995 Rugby World Cup provided an even bigger stage for Mandela to fuse his own image with that of the new nation that he was trying to build.
How do you get 42 million people to tolerate one another? Rugby was traditionally a white man’s game in South Africa, and the black majority population would routinely support the teams of opposing nations. However, Mandela seized upon the PR opportunity of South Africa hosting the 1995 tournament to rebrand the Springbok team, whose kit took on the colors of the new national flag. One team, one country, all would walk tall under the new flag. Mandela even demanded that the team learn the words of the new national anthem, ‘Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika’, asking God to bless Africa for all of us. Although the firm underdogs, the national team was able to beat the New Zealand All Blacks in the final – Mandela’s single act of wearing the Springbok jersey was said to bring on side 99% of the white and 99% of the black South African audience, in a single stroke.
Team captain Morné de Plessis helpfully argued that this campaign was “respecting the people that we represented and what we could give back.” After the game, the team took a boat trip to the Robben Island prison, further adding to the national symbolism. “The world needs moments of great joy… the world needs to see that there are moments that we can live together,” de Plessis said, adding: “Sport is the great leveler. [Our victory was inspired by] the father of this nation, the one who inspired to come together when we never ever believed that we could do it. That’s called leadership.”
The other big shared experience designed to bring together opposing factions was the creation of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission. This was about creating a public forum where people could air confront their former aggressors, make their voice heard and get to the truth. Mandela wanted to avoid the acrimony of the Nuremburg trials, which he felt had turned into a vengeful witch-hunt. Instead, this was “soft vengeance… the triumph of a moral vision of the moral world.”
CEOs too can learn to acknowledge the past and draw a line under it. Then, through shared experiences, they must forge a powerful new purpose that people can connect to and believe in.
(4) Embody the spirit of Ubuntu
In 2007, in partnership with entrepreneur Richard Branson and singer Peter Gabriel, Mandela founded ‘The Elders’. Composed of former heads of state, revolutionaries, peacemakers and chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, The Elders work as a small, dedicated group of individuals, using their collective experience and influence to help tackle some of the most pressing problems facing the world today.
In the launch address, Mandela talked about bringing “the spirit of Ubuntu: that profound African sense that we are human only through the humanity of other human beings.” In a thread that defines his whole life, he said, “I believe that in the end that it is kindness and accommodation that are the catalysts for real change.”
With such high ideals, Mandela was alert to the potential dangers of his own personality cult. He learned to talk less about “I” and more about “we,” and was determined “to be looked at as an ordinary human being”. Mandela himself has repeatedly said that “I’m no angel,” and his presidential predecessor F.W. de Klerk concurs: “He was by no means the avuncular, saint-like figure depicted today. As an opponent he could be brutal and quite unfair.” However, while people may have disagreed with the policies Mandela pursued, they don’t question his integrity. His biographer believes that “it was his essential integrity more than his superhuman myth which gave his story its appeal across the world.”
CEOs are rarely, if ever, depicted as angels, but people have to trust them. Even if they’re not liked, people will rally behind them if they know what they stand for and what they believe in.
(5) Everybody feels bigger in your presence
Time and again people comment on Mandela’s strong personality, saying that he has a aura about him. Fêted by crowds around the world, Mandela mixed politics and showbiz; criticized for prioritizing social engagements with the Spice Girls or Michael Jackson over a visiting head of state.
The adoration of crowds did not faze him: “I am not very nervous of love, for love is very inspiring.” However, Mandela is also a man of intrinsic humility, with the ability to laugh at himself. “I’m only here to shine her shoes,” he said when meeting Whitney Houston. At a White House reception for religious leaders, Bill Clinton paid an emotional tribute to his guest: “Every time Nelson Mandela walks into a room we all feel a little bigger, we all want to stand up, we all want to cheer, because we’d like to be him on our best day.”
Leaders and CEOs who have this x-factor succeed. Our gut feels their absence when they are replaced by a less charismatic successor, even if we delude ourselves that the new guy is a welcome sobering contrast. British prime minister Gordon Brown was no match for the towering presence of Tony Blair; and even if seen to be doing many of the right things at Apple, Tim Cook lacks the swagger of innovator-supreme Steve Jobs.
(6) Build a sustainable fellowship around your cause
It is interesting to speculate how Nelson Mandela would have fared in the age of social media. Confined to his prison cell, much of the technological era passed him by. However, he was never short of followers, and he understood that mass engagement began with a solid core base. Permitted to converse with other prisoners at Robben Island only when laboring at its mine, his inner core was variously termed the ‘brotherhood’, ‘kitchen cabinet’ and ‘university’. The bedrock of his trusted inner sanctum provided him with the foundation from which to keep on being inspiring. Those who were admitted to Mandela’s close fellowship during those years also flourished: close friend Ahmed Kathrada went on to hold senior government positions, while Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma graduated to lead the party. Political prisoners admitted that they actually looked forward in a sense to going to prison, as they would get to meet the true leaders of the country.
Often seeming to be above race, once in power Mandela broadened his fellowship to include white and Indian colleagues, whom he trusted them completely. He made former president F.W. de Klerk his deputy, and his “rainbow cabinet” was one of the few genuinely multiracial governments in the world. Looking to the corporate world, Jack Ma of Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba has also been effective at drawing to his cause a group of highly loyal co-founders. CEOs should develop a true fellowship structure that devolves responsibility and brings on promising talent.
7) Bottle the dream for future generations
After 27 years in captivity, it is easy to overlook the fact that Mandela was only actually president of South Africa for five years. He said that he was one of the generation “for whom the achievement of democracy was the defining challenge”. Aged 80 by the time he stepped down in 1999, Mandela argued that, “when a man has done what he considers to be his duty to his people and his country, he can rest in peace… We take leave so that the competent generation of lawyers, computer experts, economists, financiers, doctors, industrialists, engineers and above all ordinary workers and peasants can take the ANC into the new millennium.”
Many great leaders are true ‘one-offs’ and it is too simplistic to suggest that they should seek to bottle their essence to be preserved in aspic. Rather, the big challenge for them is to groom the next generation and ‘blend the essence’ so that it’s fit for their current and future organization. His chosen successor and fellowship member, Thabo Mbeki, was effectively running the country for some of the years while Mandela was still president, with Mandela taking on an increasingly ceremonial role.
The verdict so far on his successors? The next generation of ANC leaders has not been seen to deliver universally good governance: the country continues to be blighted by crime, and the OECD reports that more than 50% of the population is living in poverty. However, South Africa is still is a young country, one that Mandela stamped with the concept of racial tolerance and cooperation as firmly as his predecessors had stamped it with intolerance and segregation.
What we’ve experienced from Mandela’s life is potentially just the start, and his legend is going to be bigger still. In the corporate world that’s my life’s work, we desperately need a new generation of companies that are truly global, courageous and entrepreneurial, and institutions that people care for. Their future leaders would do well to adopt the Mandela mindset and his seven profound lessons.
Having discharged his duty to his people and his country, Mandela can truly rest in peace. He showed us how one person with humility, a dream and a connecting cause could magnify himself and inspire us all. He should take great pride in the legacy that he leaves behind, as it continues to ripple across the world and through future generations. Nelson Mandela: a true legend.
By Steve Tappin
Chief Executive, Xinfu, Host, BBC CEO Guru & Founder, World Of CEOs
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Management expert Steve Tappin is the host of the BBC CEO Guru. The program features in-depth, on-the-record interviews with some of the world’s top chief executives, including General Electric's Jeff Immelt, Lenovo’s Liu Chuanzhi, WPP’s Martin Sorrell, China Vanke’s Wang Shi, Wholefoods’ John Mackey and Unilever’s Paul Polman.
Steve is the author of ‘The Secrets Of CEOs’, which interviews 200 CEOs on business life and leadership. His latest book, ‘Dream to Last’, was published in Mandarin in December 2012, by Beijing University Press, and will be released in English later this year. Steve is the founder of global CEO confidants Xinfu, which is based in London and Beijing. In this capacity, he works with the CEOs of high-growth and Fortune 500 companies, to help them achieve long-term success. Steve also recently launched ‘World Of CEOs’, a new venture that helps people to learn about, engage with and become better CEOs.