Leadership Icons

I have developed a sub-site covering leadership icons. Some of them need no presentation. It is quite obvious that Nelson Mandela, Kofi Annan, Vacel Havel, Mahathma Gandhi and Winston Churchill are great leadership icons.

However, I have also mentioned persons without any leadership record such as Astrid Lindgren and Georg Simmel. For me, Astrid Lindgren has lead several generations of children through her amazing stories about children and childhood. Characters as Pippi Longstocking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pippi_Longstocking and Emil of Lönneberga http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil_i_L%C3%B6nneberga have lead children, parents, teachers and educators in entirely new directions.

When a German icon should be chosen, many would have chosen Goethe, Humboldt, Adenauer or Habermas. However, my favorite is Georg Simmel, who was the first real sociologist - critized by many of his successors for not being systematically - and even accused of not being a sociologist. From my perspective, Simmel made brilliant, sensitive analysis of modern urban life, and was a warped existence in the academic environment in which he researched with an open mind on the basis of a cross-disciplinary approach. It is always difficult to be the one to take the first steps. http://socio.ch/sim/work.htm. The ability to take a new step is what characterizes good leadership - for formal and informal leaders.