IT’S possibly the best management book I’ve read in years, even if the author or its subject never intended it to be a book about management. The subheading to Fordsburg Fighter makes their intention obvious: The journey of an MK volunteer. But it turns out this book is about more than Umkhonto we Sizwe or politics. It is about management (or leadership) from the perspective of the managed (or the led).In a massive global industry comprising largely dull treatises on the art of management and leadership, the perspective of the managed is usually ignored. Management books generally describe a sanitised environment in which the “managed” behave as they ought to and not as humans actually behave when they are corralled together in large groups.Here we have something very different: the perspective of the foot soldier, the individual who has almost no access to power and who has to endure the grim and, in this case, at times life-threatening ineptitude of his out-of-touch leaders.As muc...
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