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In Leadership—The Inside Story: Time-Tested Prescriptions for Those Who Seek to Lead, Pietersen offers penetrating, often surprising insights from a lifetime of experience as a business leader. Pietersen shares his unique perspective on leadership as an unending journey of learning, adaptation, and growth, in which vital lessons are waiting to be discovered in every life experience and around every corner.
Filled with eye-opening anecdotes, memorable observations, and sage advice drawn from decades of hands-on experience, the book offers a host of evidence-based ideas that can help make anyone a more effective and impactful leader.
“The lessons here go far beyond corporate boardrooms and can resonate in universities, locker rooms, and across dinner tables. Incisive, insightful guide to leadership rooted in character and lifelong learning.”
“Willie Pietersen’s voice resonates with power and wisdom. . . . Packed with valuable anecdotes, lessons, and most important, practical advice, this book is a treasure trove of strategies that can be immediately applied to enhance your leadership skills.”
How the Wrong Questions Produce the Wrong Answers “If I had 60 minutes to solve a problem … I would spend 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, then I could solve the problem in less than 5 minutes.” - Albert Einstein Socrates turned the way we learn upside-down. Prior to his revolutionary practice of asking probing questions to unlock insights, roving “Sophists” in Greece taught rhetoric – the...
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Willie Pietersen was raised in South Africa, and received a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University. After practicing law, he embarked on an international business career. Over a period of twenty years he served as the CEO of multibillion-dollar businesses such as Lever Foods, Seagram USA, Tropicana and Sterling Winthrop’s Consumer Health Group.
In 1998, Pietersen was named Professor of the Practice of Management at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. He specializes in strategy and the leadership of change, and his methods and ideas, especially Strategic Learning, are widely applied within Columbia’s executive education programs, and also in numerous corporations.
