Cascio: Lessons in leadership learned from ‘institutional entrepreneurs’ at Robben Island prison
A Chinese proverb says the longest journey begins with the first step. It took countless steps, along with powerful resolve and resilience, but Nelson Mandela and his fellow political inmates in Robben Island prison forged ahead ever so slowly. They transformed a place of brutality and oppression into one of tolerance, dignity and education.
Wayne Cascio, PhD, who holds the Robert H. Reynolds Distinguished Chair in Global Leadership at the University of Colorado Denver Business School, said today’s business leaders can learn much from the metamorphosis that occurred within those grim walls over 30 years. A large audience filled a Business School lecture room to hear Cascio’s “Lessons in Leadership” talk, part of the Rutt Bridges Business Seminar Series, about his six-year research project into the unfathomable dynamics of Robben Island prison.
“This is a story about how the behavior of the prisoners changed the behavior of the guards and ultimately led to the overthrow of the apartheid system in South Africa,” said Cascio, a CU Denver professor of management who has published 28 books and over 185 articles and book chapters. “They set up their own self-government inside the prison walls.”
Although blacks made up 80 percent of the population of South Africa (whites were 8.9 percent), the apartheid regime, which ended in 1991, made them outcasts—they weren’t allowed citizenship and they had no political representation. Mandela and leaders like him were imprisoned for fear that their ideas would foment uprisings; Mandela, who would later become South Africa’s first black president and Nobel Peace Prize winner (he died in 2013 at age 95), was imprisoned for 27 years.
Cascio and his fellow researchers read through transcripts of 92 tape-recorded interviews with former inmates. He said they wanted to understand what was going on in the prison, specifically how were the prisoners able to transform a repressive, abusive and top-down culture “to a place that … was known for learning and tolerance and openness to change. How were they able to do it?”
Cascio shared quotes from the prisoners and guards, called warders, in his presentation. Their comments illuminate the macro- and micro-level strategies used by the prisoners to turn the tables on their captors.