Leadership

“Fate did not hand Genghis Khan his destiny; he made it for himself. It seemed unlikely that he would ever have enough horses to create a Spirit Banner, much less that he might follow it across the world. The boy who became Genghis Khan was the son of an outcast family left to die on the steppes, has probably encountered no more than a few hundred people in his entire childhood and received no formal education. The boy showed an instinct for survival and self-preservation, but he showed little promise of the achievement he would one day make. As a child, he feared dogs and he cried easily. Yet from this degraded circumstances of hunger, humiliation, kidnapping and slavery, he began the long climb to power ...

In conquest after conquest, the Mongol army transformed warfare into an intercontinental affair fought on multiple fronts stretching thousands of miles. Genghis Khan’s innovative fighting techniques made the heavily armoured knights of medieval Europe obsolete, replacing them with disciplined cavalry moving in coordinated units.... In 25 years of fighting, the Mongol army subjugated more lands and people than the Romans had conquered in four hundred years. Genghis Khan, together with his sons and grandsons, conquered the most densely populated civilizations of the thirteenth century. Whether measured by the total number of people defeated, the sum of the countries annexed, or by the total area occupied, Genghis Khan conquered more than twice as much as any other man in history. The hooves of the Mongol warriors’ horses splashed in the waters of every river and lake from the Pacific Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea. It stretched from the snowy tundra of Siberia to the hot plains of India, from the rice paddies of Vietnam to the wheat fields of Hungary, and from Korea to the Levante ...

In American terms, the accomplishment of Genghis Khan might be understood if the United States, instead of being created by a group of educated merchants or wealthy planters over the course of 150 years, had been founded in the course of the lifetime of one of its illiterate slaves, who, by sheer force of personality, charisma and determination, liberated America from foreign rule, united the people, created an alphabet, wrote the constitution, established universal religious freedom, invented a new system of warfare, marched an army from Canada to Brazil, and opened roads of commerce in a free-trade zone that stretched the continents. On every level and from any perspective, the scale and scope of Genghis Khan’s accomplishments challenge the limits of imaginations and tax the resources of scholarly explanation.”

From the introduction to "Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World" 
by Jack Weatherford in 2004