When Giants Fall: Leadership Lessons from the Life of Jane Goodall

Oct 03, 2025 • 11 Min Read

"What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make." - Jane Goodall

The world felt a little smaller this week when we lost Dame Jane Goodall at age 91. I met Jane in 2016, after she spoke at a Khazanah Global Lecture special and she was immensely inspiring. Yesterday, when I heard that she had passed away, I immediately started reflecting on her extraordinary legacy. I couldn't help but think about that pivotal moment in 1960 when a young woman with nothing, but a notebook, binoculars, and boundless curiosity stepped into the forests of Tanzania and changed everything we thought we knew about ourselves. It inspired me that anyone can go out there and make a difference if they want to.

You see, Jane's story isn't just about chimpanzees or conservation—though heaven knows she revolutionised both. To me, it's about leadership in its purest form, the kind that doesn't emerge from boardrooms or corner offices, but from a deep conviction that one person, armed with patience and purpose, can literally redefine what it means to be human.

1. The Power of Starting Small (with Nothing But a Dream)

What strikes me most about Jane's journey is that she had absolutely no business succeeding by conventional standards. Picture a 26-year-old secretary from London with no university degree, no scientific training, and no funding beyond six months, arrives in East Africa to study these animals. Funnily, the colonial authorities wouldn't even let her go alone; she had to bring her mother along for safety.

For the first three months, the chimpanzees fled whenever they saw her. Every morning, Jane would trek into the hills and sit there watching nothing but empty forest through binoculars. The money was running out. She soon contracted malaria. By any reasonable measure, the project should have been declared a failure.

But Jane teaches us our first leadership lesson that real leaders don't quit just because the conventional metrics say they should. Just when things looked hopeless, she climbed to that clearing above Lake Tanganyika and spotted David Greybeard—the chimpanzee who would change everything.

That moment marked what she later called "the turning point in my study". The breakthrough that didn't come from better equipment or more funding. It came from persistence, patience, and an unshakeable belief that what she was doing mattered. How many of us abandon our most important work just before the breakthrough? Jane reminds us that leadership often means continuing when every logical voice tells you to quit.

In Napoleon Hill's classic Think and Grow Rich, he tells the story of R.U. Darby, whose uncle discovered gold in Colorado during the rush days but gave up drilling just three feet short of striking it rich. After initial success, the gold vein disappeared, and despite continued drilling, Darby and his uncle found nothing but mounting debt and frustration. They sold their equipment to a junkman and returned home, convinced they had failed. The junkman, however, hired a mining engineer who discovered that the richest vein lay just three feet from where they had stopped—earning the junkman millions in gold that should have been theirs. Darby later became a millionaire himself, but only after learning this brutal lesson about the cost of premature surrender.

Jane Goodall's story offers a powerful parallel to Darby's tale, except that she refused to quit three feet short of her breakthrough. For three months in the Gombe forests, Jane sat watching empty clearings while chimpanzees fled at her approach, her funding dwindling and malaria weakening her body. Every logical voice—including the doubting scientific establishment—suggested she should abandon this impossible mission. But where Darby stopped drilling, Jane kept climbing that hill above Lake Tanganyika, day after day, until she finally spotted David Greybeard with his termite-fishing stick—the moment that revolutionized our understanding of what it means to be human.

The difference between failure and world-changing discovery wasn't talent or resources; it was simply the willingness to persist when persistence seemed pointless. Jane understood that the gold, whether literal or metaphorical, is often just three feet beyond where most people choose to quit.

2. The Art of Revolutionary Patience

Beyond discovering that chimpanzees use tools, Jane fundamentally changed the way we approach understanding others. When she witnessed David Greybeard strip leaves from a twig to fish termites from a mound, she shattered the primary distinction scientists used to separate humans from all other animals.

Jane's real genius was in her approach. While traditional scientists numbered their subjects, Jane gave them names. While others maintained clinical distance, she recognised individual personalities, relationships, and emotions. The scientific establishment initially criticised her for being "unscientific," but her patient, empathetic methodology revealed truths that rigid protocols had missed for decades.

This reminds us that true breakthroughs rarely come from established protocols, but from bringing our full humanity to the challenge. Jane's willingness to see chimpanzees as individuals rather than specimens enhanced her scientific rigor. Now, think about your own leadership context. When was the last time you challenged the conventional approach to understanding your team, your customers, or your community?

Jane proves that approaching the world with empathy can be the very road to true excellence.

3. Building Trust Across the Impossible Divide

One of Jane's most underappreciated leadership skills was her extraordinary ability to build trust across what seemed like impossible barriers. It took months for the chimpanzees to accept her presence, but once they did, she gained access to behavioural insights no human had ever witnessed.

Instead of asserting dominance or maintaining distance, she made herself vulnerable. She sat quietly at the forest's edge, day after day, allowing the chimpanzees to grow accustomed to her presence on their terms. She never forced interactions or pushed boundaries. She earned trust through consistency, respect, and genuine interest in their wellbeing.

Jane understood something most leaders don’t fully understand: trust isn't demanded or purchased; it's cultivated through patient, consistent presence.

I've seen this principle work miraculously in corporate environments, community organisations, and family systems. The leaders who create lasting change are the ones who earn it by showing up faithfully, listening deeply, and respecting boundaries. This is something I personally struggle with and am learning to do myself too. It’s a deeply personal lesson for me and I am learning daily from Jane and how she did it so effectively.

4. From Frustration to Global Movement

But here's where Jane's story becomes even more remarkable. By the 1980s, she realized that studying chimpanzees wasn't enough if their habitat was disappearing. So at age 52, she made the decision to become a full-time advocate, a choice that would define the rest of her life. This required extraordinary courage. She was already a renowned scientist with a secure career studying what she loved most. Why risk that success by entering the unpredictable world of conservation activism?

Because Jane believed that success without impact is ultimately meaningless. The transformation wasn't easy. She had to learn entirely new skills—fundraising, public speaking, political advocacy, media relations. She went from observing chimpanzees in quiet forests to addressing hostile audiences about uncomfortable truths. But she did it because she realised her unique platform came with unique responsibility. This led to her creation of Roots & Shoots in 1991, starting with just 12 Tanzanian students on her back porch. Today, the programme operates in over 60 countries with nearly 150,000 young participants.

Jane's leadership evolution taught me that true leaders are willing to leave their comfort zones when their mission demands it. Your expertise might open doors, but your willingness to grow beyond that expertise determines your ultimate impact. This is something I personally had to do leaving the comforts of corporate work with General Electric (GE) and Johnson & Johnson, 2 global companies that I worked at in comfort and happiness. Yet, the deep drive inside me to impact and transform Malaysia was a calling so big that I had to give up a great salary, perks and comfort for a life in a start-up with no access, funds or capacity. Understanding our life mission (as Jane did), is key to the impact we bring to the world.

5. The Leadership of Radical Hope

Perhaps Jane's most powerful leadership quality was her ability to maintain hope in the face of overwhelming challenges. She witnessed devastating deforestation, poaching, and climate change throughout her career. She could have become cynical or despairing. Instead, she chose what she called "active hope"—hope that creates change through determined action.

"There's still so much beauty left," she would say, "but we have to get together to save it, for our children and our children's children". Not "someone should save it" but "we have to get together." Jane understood that hope is an active choice to engage rather than retreat.

This perspective sustained her through 300 days of travel per year well into her 90s. Even in her final video message, recorded just before her death, she spoke to young people about their power to change the world and her reasons for hope.

Hope, in Jane's model, is strategic. It recognises problems honestly while refusing to surrender agency. It acknowledges the magnitude of challenges while insisting that individual action matters.

How many people or organisations fail not because they lack resources or strategy, but because they lose hope? Jane shows us that leaders who cultivate and communicate active hope create environments where extraordinary things become possible. Again, this was a deeply personal lesson for me. Cultivating hope sometimes in desperate situations that I faced running a social enterprise (lack of funding to pay salaries, no line of sight to the future, etc) can debilitate us. Yet, we need to find hope to soldier on.

6. Every Individual Makes a Difference

Jane's most famous quote, "What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make," wasn't just motivational rhetoric. It was the operational philosophy that guided her life's work. Through Roots & Shoots, she empowered young people to identify problems in their own communities and develop solutions. The projects addressed immediate needs affecting people, animals, and the environment where participants lived.

This approach reveals Jane's understanding of sustainable leadership, where real change emerges when individuals are empowered to act on their own convictions. The young people in Roots & Shoots aren't just learning about conservation—they're learning leadership itself. They're discovering that their voice matters, their actions have consequences, and their communities can be transformed when someone cares enough to try.

This is redemptive leadership at its finest, focused on both addressing immediate challenges and preparing the next generation to solve what comes next. One of the key reasons we created MAD Movement, our social enterprise, was to not only drive change and impact in spaces and bring healing to places that were broken, but to also enable young people to grow in their leadership so they can drive change. This was a huge insight from Jane’s life that inspired us to keep doing what we are doing, even if the fruits of our work may only be seen long after we are gone.

7. The Legacy That Lives On

Jane Goodall's death marks the end of an era, but her approach to leadership offers timeless lessons for anyone seeking to create meaningful change. She showed us that:

Breakthrough thinking often requires abandoning conventional approaches and bringing your full humanity to the challenge.
Trust is built through patient, consistent presence, not through assertions of authority.
True leaders evolve beyond their expertise when their mission demands it.
Hope is not a feeling but a choice—specifically, the choice to engage rather than retreat.
Sustainable change emerges when individuals are empowered to act on their convictions.

Most importantly, Jane proved that leadership isn't about the size of your platform or the impressiveness of your credentials. It's about the depth of your conviction and your willingness to act on it, especially when others say it's impossible.

Many times, in my own life (even today), when I feel convicted to do something and start acting on my convictions, everyone will start shooting me down, even my cofounder and partner. Yet, like Jane, we must sometimes ignore the naysayers and keep focused on the mission we are called for.

As I write this, young people around the world are carrying forward her work through Roots & Shoots, protecting chimpanzees through the Jane Goodall Institute, and applying her principles to challenges she never could have imagined. Her methodology of patient observation, empathetic engagement, and active hope continues to create change in contexts far beyond primatology. That's the mark of truly transformational leadership: it doesn't end when the leader passes away. It multiplies through the people they empowered and the principles they embodied.

Jane Goodall spent her life proving that one person, armed with purpose and patience, can literally change how the world sees itself. In an age of cynicism and complexity, she chose simplicity and hope. In a time of division and despair, she chose connection and action.

The question she leaves for each of us is beautifully simple, what kind of difference will you choose to make?

Jane Goodall (1934-2025) revolutionized our understanding of chimpanzees and ourselves. Her legacy continues through the Jane Goodall Institute, Roots & Shoots program, and countless individuals inspired by her example of patient, purposeful leadership.