Sarah Palin vs. Nelson Mandela

Leadership can be bad, argues Harvard Business blogger Umair Haque in an account of how “leaders simply ensure the survival of yesterday’s malfunctioning machines”. Instead, he celebrates the notion of buildership, or “economic Contructivism” as he likes to call it, where builders construct better organizations in the first place.

Builders are the fundamental causes of prosperity, such as Evan Williams, say, who spearheaded the creation of not just Twitter the company, but of microblogging – a whole new medium. Bill Gates, on the other hand, Haque describes as just a leader who led another run-of-the-mill corporation to yet another monopoly – a total black hole of buildership.

See other provocative comparisons between juggernauts like Barack Obama and Mahatma Ghandi, Nelson Mandela and Sarah Palin, and make your own judgement “who’s a Builder – and who’s just a mere leader?”