I had the good fortune last year to be involved in the development and editing of an incredible book, which was the secret memoir of Zhao Ziyang who had been the leader of China. He was the ruler of the country in 1989. During Tiananmen, he is the man who tried but failed ultimately to stop the Tiananmen Massacre. He recorded 30 hours of tape secretly while he was under house arrest after 1989. It was smuggled out of the country and a colleague and I turned it into a book last year. So during the process I really got inside Zhao's head and learned a lot about him and what made him a great leader.

While he failed in 1989 to stop the violent putdown of the peaceful protest in Beijing, he had succeeded incredibly in the years before that in bringing the early roots of economic reform to China. So the China that we think of today, this incredible economic juggernaut, this incredible export machine, he really planted the seeds for that when he was a provincial leader.

So going through that and looking at his experience, I kind of drew from it a few lessons that I think he offers to leaders and managers. And number one was experimentation. In Russia — when the Soviet Union fell apart and Russia was trying to reform that economy, they tried to do it all at once. They tried shock therapy and it failed miserably. It was too much for the system to handle.

What Zhao had done as a provincial leader in Sichuan province, in Guangdong province, was pioneer some reforms locally that could be observed, could be tested, and you sort of look for early wins and if they succeed, then you can adopt them nationally. And he did just that, some ideas that let peasants grow some extra grain for themselves after they had met their state quotas.

And this kind of minor tweaking of the old Maoist system really worked and people's living standards increased, production increased and he didn't have to put the entire nation at risk with a big experiment. Rather they tested things locally, they worked and they were adopted elsewhere. So that's number one.

Second lesson from studying Zhao is how important it is to get buy in and to get buy in from everyone, from your friends as well as your foes. Zhao was in a complicated position trying to reform a Maoist economy and dealing with colleagues, some of whom were still Maoists, who didn't see anything wrong with the previous system.

Zhao's goal was to modernize the economy, but he understood that to bring everybody along he had to be very cognizant of what their arguments were, what their objections were, and even the language that they used.

For example, he didn't say we should develop a capitalist economy or even a market economy, he talked about developing a commodity economy, which is sort of a code word it turned out for a market capitalist style system, but it was in the language that the skeptics could accept and enabled him to go forward.

And the third lesson that I draw from Zhao is to be open to change. I mean he was a lifelong communist party technocrat. That was the only professional life he knew. And at a certain point when the facts suggested that the system wasn't working, that the system needed to change, he was able to pivot. He sort of looked objectively at things.

It is very difficult when you have staked your life based on a certain sustaining myth to suddenly say, OK, it's really time to make a dramatic change. So in the book, those are really the three lessons that Zhao's life sort of leaves to us. Again even though he failed to stop the Tiananmen Massacre in the '80s, he really did deliver kind of the seeds of economic reform that continue today.

And again the lessons are gradualism, experimentation, getting buy in, and being willing to switch when you realize things are not going the way you had planned.