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

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There are 15 short chapters, referred to as 'lessons' in Richard Stengel's new book, "Mandela's Way: Fifteen Lessons on Life, Love and Courage," I confess that after reading the first four of them, "Courage is Not the Absence of Fear," "Be Measured," "Lead from the Front" and "Lead from the Back" I felt that I had the idea and was very close to putting the book down. The themes seemed clear and were already striking me as unnecessarily redundant. Mandela is a truly remarkable person, one who has lived at least three lives; One before his 27 years as a prisoner of the Apartheid regime in his native South Africa, the second while actually in prison and the third since his release. He has changed through each and has become the patient, calm man whose vision is always the 'long view' as opposed to what he regards as the less-than-useful 'short view' that he had when he was younger.
I decided to finish the book anyway. At 239 short pages, it seemed a small investment to see if there was still more to learn about him.
Stengel got very close to Nelson Mandela. For an extended period, he was by his side nearly constantly and had many, many more conversations that Mandela had originally agreed to. Clearly, the picture developed by Stengel became as important to the subject as it was to the author. The unusualness of the man is clear and while few others could be expected to arrive at his style, way of thinking and manner of approaching friends and enemies alike, one comes away from this brief but important book with the sense that it is, in the end, unusual people with unusual ways who achieve unusual (and in this instance, unlikely) things.
Viewed as a traitor by some former comrades, Mandela managed to shape a new reality in South Africa by doing things thought impossible. Speaking with old and viscous enemies like de Klerk, discouraging active violence which he had come to espouse at an earlier time, listening with observable respect to everyone - even to those he knew in his heart were wrong ... These qualities became possible as functions not just of having led two previous lives, but from having learned things he found useful from each of them.
Conventional wisdom suggests that we learn from experience. Nelson Mandela, as he is captured here by Richard Stengel, is a man who has demonstrated that experience does not, in and of itself, teach anything. Rather, experience presents us with an opportunity for learning.
No two people experiencing the same thing might come away having learned the same things from it. Nelson Mandela learned new ways to think and reason and new ways to facilitate change by taking on a seemingly trans-human calm and long view. Given the same circumstances, another man might have become more visibly angry. It is not that Mandela was not made angry, but learned to not show it. He learned the value of self-control and even of acting as a necessary means toward a valuable end.
The current nation of South Africa, as imperfect at least as every nation is, is a far better place that it would have been without the ministrations of this ever changed man.
Occasionally redundant as it may be, this revealing and worshipful tome is well worth a read by anyone interested in the specific man, the specific country or in the process of human change and development.

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 did not ask, or did not answer rightly, "What would Jesus do?

This book provides great insight into Mandela the man. If this book was advertised as a biography, it would earn five stars. But it is advertised as a book of lessons we can apply to our own lives. In that regard it came up a bit short for me, introducing life lessons here and there and providing broad-sweeping examples of leadership and character, but rarely getting to those golden "a-ha" moments that readers value. Basically, it takes the same life lessons we have read about in many other books and wraps them around Mandela. So it is a must-read for any student or fan of Mr. Mandela, or if you just want to understand this great leader at a deeper level. In that area, it is very good and I enjoyed reading it. But as a book of life lessons, for me it was missing freshness and impact.

I totally agree with another reviewer, that this book reads more like a biography than a book of "lessons". It's still a great read, but it's not quite what I thought it was going to be by the title.
I did enjoy learning more about the kind of man Mandela was, and was quite surprised to see how vulnerable he allowed himself to be for the author during their interviews and time together. There were true moments of honesty and humility in this book, as well as courage and love.
It was a bit historical and political for my tastes, but I tolerated it here because of the promise of a "lesson" at the end of each chapter, which was always delivered.
There are sixteen chapters each with a lesson to be learned:

~ courage
~ being measured
~ lead from the front
~ lead from the back
~ look the part
~ core principle
~ see the good in others
~ know your enemy
~ keep your rivals close
~ know when to say no
~ it's a long game
~ love
~ quitting
~ it's always both
~ find your own garden
~ Mandela's Gift

"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 academic curriculum encompassed literature ranging from Tolstoy to Shakespeare to Machiavelli. He became fluent in Afrikaans, the language of his enemies, and educated himself in its literature. He shocked his white prison guards with his ability to speak their tongue, earning their respect and, finally, their admiration. Anyone who has studied another language knows how difficult it is, even in the best circumstances. Mandela persisted because it enabled him to understand his enemies, including their humanity. This knowledge helped him become the Mandela who preaches forgiveness.

Stengel shows us that the man who suffered so much loss and injustice, who paid for his convictions with decades of his life and damage to family relationships, is by no means free from the pain. Yet he made a deliberate choice to forgive and to exhort fellow citizens, black and white, to do the same. His reasons are pragmatic: vindictiveness and bitterness imprison people in the past; forgiveness moves them forward. Unlike Desmond Tutu, Mahatma Gandhi, or Martin Luther King Jr., Mandela is not a man of faith. He is, the author says, a man of principle. One principle exactly: constitutional equality for all South Africa. Non-violence was the preferred approach, but dispensable if it got in the way. For years, I could not admire Mandela because of the horrible acts of violence to which the African National Congress resorted. In this book, I learned that Mandela hated violence, embraced it reluctantly for a time, but renounced it ultimately as unproductive.

I haven't read Stengel's biography, so I learned many things about Mandela that I didn't know before. This is a man who made many mistakes, squandered opportunities, and paid dearly. He still carries the pain that his mother never lived to see his success; at the time of her death, he was an apparent ne'er do well in trouble with the law. Yet his life shows there can be second chances for those committed to a vision.

When Stengel describes the way in which Mandela cultivated his prison vegetable garden over many years, I saw a metaphor for the way in which he prepared, planted, and cultivated the seeds of what became his negotiations with the South African government.

Mandela loved to garden. In the early 1970s, isolated from the rest of the world but for one letter and one visitor every six months, with everything in his world outside falling apart, Mandela decided to plant a garden. Obtaining the permission to do so took months of quiet, patient campaigning, and navigating the prison bureaucracy. Finally, he was allowed a small plot of dry, rocky soil, which, under the watch of guards, he was allowed to till using his hands. Over time, he acquired tools; friends and family sent him seeds. Fertilizer came from grinding bones he found from the many graves on the island. A few years later, he was supplying the kitchen with vegetables to supplement the prisoners' diet. Before long, he was giving bunches of vegetables to the prison guards for their families. Mandela collected and studied books on agriculture and acquired considerable expertise. Stengel said Mandela would sometimes talk using gardening metaphors, saying people could be cultivated like plants.

One can't help but see a parallel between Mandela's cultivation of his garden and the slow, controlled, process by which, over a period of years, he planned, and then initiated negotiations for peace with the South African government. As with the garden, it was a slow process, taking years of patience, recognizing the right moment, waiting for his adversary to respond, and then taking steps that flew in the face of the ANC's official position at that time, of absolute non-negotiation.

If there is one overarching lesson "Mandela's Way," it is this: we create ourselves through our choices, whatever our circumstances, whatever our past mistakes. It illustrates how Mandela chose deliberately to become who he is, and the world is more just and peaceful because of it. It is full of lessons for anyone interested in how people grow. It can be read in less than a couple of hours - and is so fascinating as to be worth reading many times over.

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 the chances that they will reveal their better selves.

"It is extraordinary that a man who was ill-treated for most of his life can see so much good in others. In fact, it was sometimes frustrating to talk with him because he almost never had a bad word to say about anyone. He would not even say a disapproving word about the man who tried to have him hanged."

Stengel adds later, "But it is not that Mandela does not see the dark side of someone like John Vorster [president of South Africa who tightened apartheid]; it is that he is unwilling to see ONLY that."

Stengel clearly admires Mandela, but is not blinded. This is an honest book -- neither hell-bent on exposing Mandela's flaws nor dedicated to overlooking them. You get a real-life, authentic profile of Nelson Mandela, one of the truly great men of our time.

In one of the most interesting chapters, Stengel describes Mandela's acceptance and even appreciation of contradictions. In the conclusion of the chapter, he writes:

"Shades of gray are not easy to articulate. Black-and-white is seductive because it is simple and absolute. It appears clear and decisive. Because of that, we will often gravitate toward yes or no answers when a "both" or a "maybe" is closer to the truth. Some people will choose a categorical yes or no simply because they think it appears strong. But if we cultivate the habit of considering both -- or even several -- sides of a question, as Mandela did, of holding both good and bad in our minds, we may see solutions that would not have otherwise occurred to us. This way of thinking is demanding. Even if we remain wedded to our point of view, it requires us to put ourselves in the shoes of those with whom we disagree. That takes an effort of will, and it requires empathy and imagination. But the reward, as we can see in the case of Mandela, is something that can fairly be described as wisdom."

I picked up this not knowing much about Nelson Mandela after being suggested in the book of the week on a popular current affairs show on TV. The book turned out to be an amazing read, kind of what I was looking for, it mostly talks about Nelson Mandela's leadership qualities and how he picked them up besides some personal ones. The is a kind of a bridge between authors earlier work with Nelson Mandela while he did his autobiography and principles tactics that he follows to be a good leader. Most of it seems to come from notes, journals, interviews, interactions, time he spend with him over a few years on the autograph project. The world knows how a great leader, person Nelson Mandela is but what this book captures is that he's just like any other person with normal fears, aspirations, pressures, the books captures the principles he follows to keep him going through and succeed all with illustrated anecdotes from Mandela's life. Some of these lessons and good common sense values are very helpful can also applied to day to day life not just political leadership. The book is extremely simple in presentation most importantly honest, balanced with foibles in portrayal, easy to read. A must read for any body wanting to know Nelson Mandela's life principles he formatted during the course of his struggle to end apartheid and in turn become a leader in a very concise book.

Stengel, who helped Mandela with his autobiography, is quite frank in his introduction. This book distills a series of lessons from the awe-inspiring scope of Mandela's life. It serves as a kind of potted biography, summarising many key nuggets of experience. For those who've read Long Road to Freedom, it's like watching the trailer to a movie you've seen. The source material is so compelling, though, that it's worth going back to

Richard Stengel has written a superb book on Nelson Mandela and captured both the essence and charm of a man who overcame racism and bitterness after 27 years in prison to lead South Africa through it's most repressive period. While Mandela's Way is a short book, it still offers readers an unusual glimpse into the heart, soul and political mind of Africa's greatest leader to date.

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.