Product Description
Leadership Lessons from Books I Have Read: The collective wisdom, knowledge and experience from the pages of fifty books
Author: Tshilidzi Marwala
Format: Trade Paperback
‘Professor Marwala has sought to understand what good leadership should mean by drawing on the collective experience of authors who have written on many topics.’ – THABO MBEKI We cannot underestimate how critical strong leadership is in all aspects of our lives. It enables us to run our lives, homes, communities, workplaces and nations.
Given its importance, it is pertinent to ask: What is the source of good leadership? Albert Einstein once said, ‘The only source of knowledge is experience.’ Many philosophers have observed this and, if we accept experience as the only source of knowledge, can we extend this conclusion to leadership? Or is the basis of good leadership intuition or instinct? Or is it perhaps a combination of these? In Leadership Lessons from Books I Have Read Tshilidzi Marwala adopts the thesis that the source of good leadership is knowledge, and the source of knowledge is experience, which can take many forms – reading widely, listening, and engaging in discussion and debate with other knowledge seekers.
If leadership is derived from knowledge and knowledge is derived from experience, the ‘experience’ in this book is from 50 books that Tshilidzi has read, and so the source of knowledge informing leadership is the collective experience of the more than 50 accomplished authors who wrote those books including, among others, Chinua Achebe, Thomas Sankara, NoViolet Bulawayo, Nelson Mandela, Mandla Mathebula, Eugène Marais, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Daniel Kahneman, Karl Marx, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Nassim Taleb and Aristotle.
Divided into four sections, Tshilidzi shares his leadership lessons in the areas of Africa and the diaspora; the search for the ideal polity; science, technology and society; and the leadership of nations. ‘Those who do not read, should not lead.’ – TSHILIDZI MARWALA
About the Author
PROFESSOR TSHILIDZI MARWALA, the author of Leading in the 21 st Century and Leadership Lessons from Books I Have Read, is the Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Johannesburg (UJ). He holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering (magna cum laude) from Case Western Reserve University (USA), a PhD specialising in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Engineering from the University of Cambridge, and a postdoctoral fellowship at Imperial College (London). Professor Marwala also completed the Advanced Management Program (AMP) at Columbia University Business School. Professor Marwala has published 23 books on AI (one was translated into Chinese) and was a visiting scholar at Harvard University, the University of Cambridge and Nanjing Tech University. He has received more than 45 awards, including the Order of Mapungubwe, and is a board member of Nedbank, a trustee of the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the Deputy Chair of the Presidential Commission on the 4IR.
For custom orders and quotes: shop@schoolspace.co.za
© 2026 Schoolspace. This product description is the exclusive intellectual property of the publisher, protected under copyright law. Unauthorized use, adaption, or copying is strictly prohibited.
