Management mantras from the Mahatma and leadership lessons from Lincoln?

Mahatma Gandhi in almost every way makes for the most unlikely candidate for CEO. A passively resistant, scantily clad, selfless individual being offered as a model for business leadership? Why not, says Alan Axelrod. If he had his way, Gandhi would be leading some of the most turbulence-struck companies out of financial mayhem. In his book Gandhi, Ceo: 14 Principles to Guide & Inspire Modern Leaders, he emphatically makes a case for his leadership ideology that he believes would work for any high stakes enterprise. "He did what the world's most effective leaders so — set absolute power aside and earn compliance instead. He used his own personal values as ammunition to persuade not force," he says. 

Yet Gandhi is a surprising choice as most would agree, as far removed from being a mercenary as anyone, led not by the forces of market capitalism but by fundamental compulsions of liberty and freedom. So why would Gandhi make a great CEO today and how would he run a complex, fast-growing business enterprise? Business, says Axelrod, is first and foremost about people, and Gandhi saw every problem as a human problem, in many ways like a great executive who takes the time to take care of each employee's needs on the one hand and make decisions impacting millions the next. That, he says, is the opposite of a leader like Joseph Stalin who didn't care for individuals but believed in mass movements. The point Axelrod makes here is that Gandhi didn't actually appeal to the British government but to humanity at large to live in liberty by doing the right thing to one another, and thereby compelled the government to get out of the way. 

And it wasn't conceptual, abstract discussion he persuaded with, Gandhi demonstrated by action. As he himself once said: "You must be the change you wish to see in the world". "He said 'don't try to change the world just march to the sea and make salt, go back to home spun cloth, start doing things and make it happen'," says Axelrod. He makes reference to William Carlson William, a great American 20th century poet who famously coined the phrase: "No ideas but in things", saying this was precisely the approach Gandhi followed. "Governments were powerless against this approach. He presented the Raj with a handful of salt, what could they do? That was the genius of Gandhi." 

Axelrod, one of the top authorities on leadership who's previously made CEOs out of Queen Elizabeth I and Dwight Eisenhower, has made it a habit to discern and distill leadership principles out of historical figures and apply them to today's business world. He's written well over a 100 books and edited several more and admits that many of the figures he's attracted seem like perverse choices because they're notoriously divisive. "(George) Patton for example, even Eisenhower, are considerably controversial and Elizabeth I was an absolute monarch," he says. What they all have in common though, is that they were all at the helm of dysfunctional, failing enterprises. The Raj was failing to satisfy the needs of the Indian people and England of Elizabeth I was a failed state, torn by religious bigotry, bankrupt and geographically on the periphery of Europe.