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Every entrepreneur, almost by definition, sets out to change something--an inefficient market, a previously unsolvable customer problem, an ossified internal culture. Compared to what Nelson Mandela changed in his country’s political arena all that seems rather minor. But what allowed him to succeed against utterly improbable odds were the same characteristics that you need to employ in effecting lasting change in your business arena. Moncler Uomini Giacca Republique Grigio. Leading through change takes earned authority, authenticity, commitment, mastery of communication and consistency of message.

As researchers of strategy and organizational change,we’ve found unbelievably rich examples of transformational leadership in Mandela’s life. Today, on the news of this great leader’s passing, I wanted to relate two favorite anecdotes that illustrate why he was so successful at giving people a reason to follow him--and to feel better about themselves for having done so.

 He appreciated the power of symbols and the moral persuasiveness of genuine acts of magnanimity

 One of Mandela’s greatest legacies is starting the national healing process from the moment he was released. An exceptional symbolic act in this regard was his visit to Betsie Verwoerd, the wife of the “architect of Apartheid” who was assassinated later in his life. Not only did Mandela visit his widow, but he was willing to do so at her home in Orania. This was an Afrikaner homeland and a striking anachronistic symbol of racial separation. Mrs. Verwoerd chose to live there as a widow after apartheid had been abolished. Moncler Uomini Giacca Hubert Grigio.Mandela’s recurring emphasis on mutual forgiveness was truly remarkable. In 1993, after his recent released from 27 years in prison, he said: “I am working now with the same people who threw me into jail, persecuted my wife, hounded my children from one school to the other… and I am one of those who are saying: Let us forget the past, and think of the present.” Later, in a 2000 interview with the Christian Science Monitor, Mandela reiterated the same message: “For all people who have found themselves in the position of being in jail and trying to transform society, forgiveness is natural because you have no time to be retaliative.”  

 He set an example of reconciliation and vision for his countrymen and then let them know he expected them to live up to it.

 By the time Mandela became President in 1994 he already knew many high profile business leaders and companies personally. It was not uncommon for him to summon some of them to support a project such as a health clinic for a rural area. One such leader received a call from Mandela’s office requesting that he accompany the President to the Eastern Cape. Moncler  donne gilet. This leader was less than enthusiastic and pleaded that he had an appointment around mid-day clashing with Mandela’s request. But there was no denying Mandela, so the leader agreed to go--but first consulted with his financial director to set a reasonable limit on the size of the anticipated donation request. They settled on 500,000 Rand, or about $50,000 in those days.

 When the Air Force plane landed, the President and he were whisked off in a military helicopter. The final destination was a large football stadium in an area that had been devastated by flooding. Mandela was visiting there to support and review the re-construction efforts. Upon landing, about 80,000 black school children--all adorned in crisp white shirts--simultaneously bowed to acknowledge the great man’s arrival. As they were climbing down from the helicopter, Mandela planted his hand firmly in his guest’s back and said, “Now, I hope you are not going to disappoint me?” The business leader decided in that instance to double the donation to one million Rand. After all, how could he tell a man who sacrificed as much as Mandela that he couldn’t afford to be more generous?

Nobody likes getting rejected, which is one reason we often think twice before asking for a favor. If we believe we’re likely to get turned down, why bother? But recent research led by Daniel Newark, a doctoral candidate in organization studies, shows that we overestimate the chance that our requests for help will be denied — especially after we’ve been turned down before. And that suggests we should be asking for help more readily and from a wider set of people than we currently are.

Newark collaborated on the studies with Francis Flynn and Vanessa Bohns, Moncler Femmes Veste Alpin Rouge,researchers who in earlier experiments had shown that people tend to grossly underestimate how likely others are to grant a favor. (For example, participants in one of their studies thought that to get 3 people to agree to lend their cellphones for brief calls they would have to ask about 10 people, whereas they needed to ask only 6.) Flynn had a theory to explain such prediction errors, which his experiments bore out. “When people are asking for help, they’re really focusing on how big is this ‘ask,’” he said at a 2010 conference on the science of eliciting good behavior. But for the potential help giver, the attention is on a different question. “They’re thinking not so much about the costs of saying yes as the costs of saying no: How awkward would it be for me to say no? Moncler Hommes Veste Zin Bleu. How uncomfortable would I feel?”

But would the gap between help seekers’ expectations and the reality be smaller or greater when a second request was made of the same person?

To find out, the trio of researchers had participants stop strangers on the Stanford campus and, following a simple script, request two favors: fill out a short survey and then, regardless of how the stranger responded to that request, drop off a letter at a nearby post office. Before sending the participants out, the researchers asked them to guess what would happen, so that the predictions could be compared with the strangers’ actual behavior. The help seekers expected that people who refused the first request would be much less likely to say yes to a second request.

They couldn’t have been more wrong. “What we found,” Newark says, “was that the percentage of people saying yes to the second request was higher than the percentage saying yes to the first request.” In other words, saying no the first time actually made people more likely to say yes the second time,Moncler Hommes Veste Maya Vert, even though the two favors were equally small.

“It can be very difficult for help seekers to appreciate the discomfort of refusing someone’s request for help not only once, but twice. Having already said no once, it can be more guilt-inducing and uncomfortable to say no a second time,” Newark explains. Indeed, a follow-up study by the trio showed that such feelings of discomfort are precisely what’s behind potential helpers’ tendency to agree to the second favor at rates higher than those for the first. Help seekers, meanwhile, don’t merely fail to anticipate this discomfort: They also read too much into the first no, seeing it as a sign that they’re probably dealing with a person who’s unhelpful in general.

Out in the real world, these divergent thought processes create a kind of paradox: “Help seekers may be the least likely to ask for help from those people who in fact are the most likely to help them.” And over time, that means we tend to go back to the same small pool of people who’ve helped us in the past. This can happen in organizations, Newark points out, where those who say yes early on during their tenure get lots of requests in the future. That leads group members to an unfortunate tendency to overburden the same set of helpers while underutilizing other group members, who, this research suggests, might say yes if you try them again.

“If anyone who tells us no once gets taken out of the potential pool of people we can trust or turn to for help, that’s a pretty high bar,” Newark says. “Even helpful people refuse to help sometimes. When someone tells us no, it could be because of circumstances that have nothing to do with a person’s willingness to help, and in the long run, we’ll be better off if we’re not quick to write people off after a single rejection.”