Mandela: His 8 Lessons of Leadership

As he celebrates his 90th birthday, the world's greatest moral leader reflects on a lifetime of service — and what the rest of us can learn from it

Hans Gedda / Sygma / Corbis

Though Mandela has retreated from the public stage, the 90-year-old still speaks out, as he did in condemning Zimbabwe's Mugabe.

Nelson Mandela has always felt most at ease around children, and in some ways his greatest deprivation was that he spent 27 years without hearing a baby cry or holding a child's hand. Last month, when I visited Mandela in Johannesburg — a frailer, foggier Mandela than the one I used to know — his first instinct was to spread his arms to my two boys. Within seconds they were hugging the friendly old man who asked them what sports they liked to play and what they'd had for breakfast. While we talked, he held my son Gabriel, whose...

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