We live in an unprecedented global time with threats that transcend national borders and where popular nationalism cannot survive. Now is the time to step up with radical new thinking and bold new actions. Anne Pratt invites you to join the Global Mandela Leadership Movement For Change because you are all called to lead. In this show, empower yourself with insights from international, intergenerational bold disruptors, radical thinkers, and inspiring champions of change. Join us as we explore leadership, debate radical ideas, and lead boldly into the future with leaders of the new generation.
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Listen to the podcast here.
Leading Boldly Into The Future with Anne Pratt
Join Our Global Movement For Change – Your Call to Action
Upfront, let me say I believe in you. I believe in your ability to save our planet and heal our deep divides. My name is Anne Pratt. I’m formerly from South Africa and relocated abroad to attend a Harvard Leadership Fellowship in beautiful Boston in the United States of America.
This show is your urgent call to action. It’s an urgent response to what the world needs now: a radical new leadership paradigm to make this world a lasting and better place for all. It is part of the Global Mandela Leadership Movement for Change, designed to remind our generation and to educate and empower the next. We’re living in a pivotal Global Mandela Moment, a twin pillar moment of despair and hope.
This show and movement are a culmination of my life, my career, my purpose, and my passion.
I grew up in a deeply divided apartheid South Africa, a country plagued by hatred, bitterness, anger, and war. I lived through South Africa’s miracle transformation from a brutal autocracy into a modern stable democracy. In my young business career, I worked with the great multinational consumer goods giant Unilever, where smart strategies, world-class excellence, and the highest standards of integrity were the order of the day.
I co-founded and ran a top executive search firm working in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors and interviewed and assessed around 10,000 leaders across the African continent and worldwide. I met Nelson Mandela, a day I imagined and prayed for as a young child. I worked with his board at the Mandela Foundation to find and assess a CEO, a transformational leader, to navigate his foundation in turbulent times.
Miraculously, I survived ovarian cancer and came to Harvard to forge a new leadership pathway to impact the world. Nelson Mandela’s life and leadership example matter today more than ever.
On January 18th, 2017, I arrived in a cold Cambridge, a bustling metropolitan suburb of Boston. A new country on a new continent and a new adventure. It was a childhood dream come true.
Two days later, on January 20th, 2017, I watched as Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States, and a new administration entered the White House. I felt the growing tensions leading up to this day, and I wondered: What is the future of leadership for the United States and for the world?
Fast forward four years to January 6th, 2021, in the US Capital, another monumental moment of heightened conflict, relentless crisis, and deathly deep divides.
The night Mandela died on December 5th, 2013, and the days that followed was my pivotal moment. It was my wake-up call and my call to action. I felt and witnessed the global power of Mandela’s life, his leadership, and his legacy. Five hundred VIPs, celebrities, artists, four US Presidents, kings, and queens from 190 different countries flew across the oceans to pay tribute to his glorious life. Mandela died the way he lived, connecting foes and friends alike.
Mandela died the way he lived, connecting foes and friends alike. Click To TweetI watched United States President Obama shaking hands with Cuba’s President Castro. It was like a bolt of lightning. That day I knew I would come to Harvard to learn more, write, and share Mandela’s Leadership Blueprint with you and the world.
In the last five years in my new home, in an increasingly divided States of America, I’ve listened and learned both inside and outside the classroom in this new university of life.
I traveled from beautiful Boston in the Northeast, across the vast open lands of the Midwest, to the sunshine beaches of Galveston, Texas. I met and spoke with young, energetic, and aspiring leaders who care about this country and the world: at Harvard Men’s Basketball Team, at Utah Valley University Woodbury School of Business, high school graduates from Goodland in Kansas, and Santa Fe, New Mexico.
I sat around family dinner tables long into the night, toasted to everyday celebrations, and debated with passionate Americans with conflicted and conflicting points of view in Beaver Lake, Arkansas; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Manhattan Beach in California; and on the mountain slopes in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
I immersed myself in the magnificent mountainous Aspen, Colorado. In a hospital ICU, I listened to the starting tales of Rural Mississippi. I danced in the iconic Beale Street Jazz clubs just down the road from the Lorraine Motel, the assassination burial spot of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee.
I stopped and had breakfast in Houston, Texas, with a dear mentor and friend I’ve known for decades. A powerful American woman who motivated and inspired me to do a lot of my inner work and healing, forgive my late father and embrace all of humanity. I left delighted to see her and surprised by her current social and political views.
On the global stage, we live in an unprecedented global time with threats that transcend national borders and where popular nationalism cannot survive. We live in a new era that requires radical new thinking, bold new actions, and a global movement for change. A world teetering on the edge of a third World War. A world harassed by cybercriminals shutting down large infrastructure grids across a global internet. A world with mass migrations of 3.5% of an 8 billion human population, around 218 million absolutely desperate and displaced people seeking food, shelter, and safety.
Most daunting of all, we live in a world facing the biggest human existential threat of all time, a world with flash floods, rising oceans, and a world on fire. I have to ask you: how do you feel about the current state of leadership quality? The conduct of those in power? The future of democracies? and Climate change, a world on fire? You are not alone. Let me share some statistics.
In November 2021, Harvard’s Youth Poll showed that 50% of young Americans, 18 to 29-year-olds, fear for the future of democracy. In the business world, a recent global poll of more than 5,000 companies worldwide, multi-million and multi-billion USA dollar revenue businesses. In those companies, 85% of employees have little or no confidence in the top executives’ ability to lead.
If you’re wondering if this is a current or recent trend, let me take you back in time. In 2004, Stanford Professor Robert Sutton wrote and published in the Harvard Business Review an article called The No Asshole Rule, Building A Civilized Workplace And Surviving One That Isn’t. He got such an overwhelming resounding response he turned it into a 2007 bestselling and award-winning business book.
The current leadership models are not working. They are broken, and they have been broken for a long time. In this moment of despair and hope, there is a new, better way, a Nelson Mandela way. Nelson Mandela transformed himself. He changed a nation. He energized and inspired the world, igniting and uniting a global anti-apartheid movement that brought the apartheid government to its knees. The world has done it before, and we can do it again.
For a moment, think about where you were on May 10th, 1994. The day Nelson Mandela went from prisoner to president in a brand-new Democratic South Africa. Mandela, the alleged terrorist, revolutionized leadership. Today, you, too, can revolutionize leadership and develop a radical new way to think, act and lead.
In this show, you can empower yourself with insights from international, intergenerational bold disruptors, radical thinkers, and inspiring champions of change. Each one shares their untold Mandela moment.
Together, we explore:
- What leadership is?
- We dispel the myths of those in power because you are all called to lead.
- The big issues.
- The future leader mindset, and
- Bigger and better thinking, it is so much more than logic and IQ. Like Mandela, you too can develop practical, physical, emotional, social, cultural, environmental, and existential or spiritual intelligences. For example, Mandela forgave his oppressors after 27 years in prison and invited his prison wardens to his inauguration.
We also debate:
- Why universities, colleges, and leading organizations need to radically reform the way they develop tomorrow’s leaders.
- Why moral courage is not enough and
- Why a president is never above the law.
- What is the future of leadership?
Leadership is a dance. Like Nelson Mandela did for South Africa and the world, like the global hit song, Jerusalema, let us once again ignite and unite in a global call to action, a global movement to lead boldly into the future.
Sign up, stand up, and share with your friends. By signing up, you join our Global Mandela Leadership Movement for Change, cocreated with my dear Harvard and Aspen friends and colleagues, Mercy Odongo and Teddy Warria, and co-founded with the many powerful and compelling voices on this show.
In closing, I ask, “If not you, then who? If not now, then when?”
Bless this hopeful world, and let our journey begin.
One Response
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