Leadership Lessons: Warren Buffett, Walt Disney, Thomas Edison, Katharine Graham, Steve Jobs, and Ray Kroc

Book excerpt: Great leaders have a great deal to teach those of us who aspire to leadership. But their lessons are as diverse and sometimes contradictory as the leaders themselves; we have to pick and choose among them, matching our own talents, temperament, and shortcomings with those of the models we aim to copy. Here are studies of six business titans of the recent past who offer a wide range of precepts for leadership: Warren Buffett, the most successful investor in history, who combines vast wealth with honesty, unfeigned modesty, and self-deprecating wit; Walt Disney, the great entertainer, who promoted family values but was also a tyrannical micro-manager; Thomas Alva Edison, the world's most prolific inventor, who gave us the phonograph, the incandescent light, the electric generator, and motion pictures; Katharine Graham, who earned world fame as the courageous publisher whose Washington Post led the fight to uncover the Watergate scandal that drove Richard Nixon from the White House; Steve Jobs, the Apple co-founder and genius who dazzled the world with the revolutionary iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad; and Ray Kroc, the late-blooming entrepreneur who built McDonald's into the world's biggest fast-food restaurant chain. No reader will follow all of their precepts, but all six offer vital lessons for anyone who wants to be a leader.