What the Best CEOs Know : 7 Exceptional Leaders and Their Lessons for Transforming any Business - Hardcover

Krames,Jeffrey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0071382402 ISBN 13: 9780071382403

Publisher: McGraw-Hill, 2003

Synopsis

Leadership lessons from the best--Gates, Welch, Dell, Gerstner, Kelleher, Grove, and Walton

What are the traits, tactics, and strategies of the business world's most transformative leaders . . . and what can the rest of us learn from them? In What the Best CEOs Know, leadership authority Jeffrey Krames examines the careers of seven of history's most accomplished CEOs--including in-depth interviews with Michael Dell, Lou Gerstner, and Herb Kelleher--to get candid answers to many of today's most compelling business questions.

The result is a blueprint-like framework that instructs as well as it informs, and provides managers with the firsthand secrets of leadership giants. Proven learning tools--from cases and lesson summaries to selfassessment exercises--reinforce the book's methods and key ideas. Each chapter of What the Best CEOs Know provides innovative features including:

• Assess Your CEO Quotient
• Leadership Lessons of the CEO
• What would Jack Welch et al. do?

A host of well-known and bestselling books have detailed the success formulas of specific CEOs. But until now, no single book has compiled the strategies of several CEOs--let alone the world's most well-known business leaders--into a handbook for achieving breakthrough corporate stewardship. What the Best CEOs Know does exactly that, combining the wisdom, strategies, and tactics of today's most accomplished CEOs into one powerful and one-of-a-kind business resource.

About this title

About the Author

Jeffrey A. Krames is a vice president and publisher at McGraw-Hill, and has two decades of experience in business and financial publishing. He is the bestselling author of The Rumsfeld Way and The Jack Welch Lexicon of Leadership.

From the Back Cover

Leadership Strategies and Secrets of Seven Extraordinarily Successful CEOs

What the Best CEOs Know looks at the careers of this generation's top CEOs, examining the beliefs and actions that propelled each to the top of the corporate world. By exploring what they did, why they did it, and what might have happened had they done it differently, this remarkable book turns the wisdom, strategies, and tactics of these business-world icons into a step-by-step handbook for the pursuit and achievement of breakthrough corporate leadership--at any level, in any industry.

Praise for What the Best CEOs Know:

"For those without the time to keep up with the flood of CEO biographies, this is the thinking man's encapsulated summary.  Krames distills the core insights from the elite of business leadership in our time.  He captures the powerful insights rather than the conventional wisdom, and he simplifies without dumbing down. But most of all, he presents a provocative, engaging read that will stretch the thinking of any practicing manager."--Christopher Bartlett, Thomas D. Casserly, Jr. Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Graduate School of Business

"By capturing the unique traits and strategies of these seven leaders, Krames gives aspiring CEOs a valuable blueprint for success in an increasingly tough global market."--Klaus Kleinfeld, President & CEO, Siemens Corporation

Michael Dell ... Bill Gates ... Lou Gerstner ... Andy Grove ... Herb Kelleher ... Sam Walton ... Jack Welch ...

What the Best CEOs Know goes beyond theory and guesswork to look at how seven contemporary business icons carved their own paths to the pinnacles of corporate achievement. This no-nonsense guide isolates and examines the specific skills and styles that contributed to each CEO's well-documented achievements. Its straightforward, sometimes startling, but always battle-tested guidelines for achievement include:

• How Bill Gates trusted the instincts of his employees and successfully transformed Microsoft into a leading Web driver and innovator
• How Andy Grove fostered awareness in his troops--what he calls paranoia--to sense threats and turn them to Intel's competitive advantage
• How Michael Dell created a computer juggernaut by placing customers at the epicenter of his enterprise
• How Jack Welch created a learning infrastructure, aligning rewards with results to make GE an organization that harnessed the ideas and intellect of every employee
• Herb Kelleher's rules for creating an exceptional small company culture, even as Southwest grew to more than 30,000 employees

Along with subject interviews and expert analyses, What the Best CEOs Know features interactive What Would (the CEO) Do? case studies, Assessing Your CEO Quotient self-tests, and other innovative features to help you apply these traits and strategies to your own career. Contributions from CEOs and leading business theorists, including Philip Kotler, examine the CEOs from different viewpoints and add insights to particular concepts. Each chapter concludes with additional suggestions for adapting and implementing industry-specific ideas to improve your own organization.

Bestselling business author Jeffrey Krames is renowned for identifying the essence of leadership and communicating it in terms that are easy to both understand and apply. In What the Best CEOs Know, he reveals the defining traits, strategies, and accomplishments of today's captains of corporate innovation--and delivers a vastly entertaining yet comprehensively researched framework for breakthrough success in virtually any industry or environment.

Reviews

In his opening remarks, Krames identifies the "celebrity CEO." This person is the company leader who's "idealized, even idolized," whose image graces magazine and book covers, and who is often asked to weigh in on the issues of the day. Celebrity CEOs ran wild in the 1990s and early 2000s. Alas, says Krames, v-p and publisher of McGraw-Hill's business books division, the celebrity CEO's era has ended. But some champion CEOs of that time do have wisdom to impart, and in this thorough and thoughtful examination of successful leadership strategies, Krames dissects the ideas of some of the biggest names that have graced business headlines in the past 10 or so years. The list is impressive: Michael Dell (Dell Computer), Jack Welch (GE), Lou Gerstner (IBM), Andy Grove (Intel), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Herb Kelleher (Southwest Airlines) and Sam Walton (Wal-Mart). Although only one of the subjects still holds the CEO title, all seven have implemented world-famous success methods. Krames pinpoints their defining traits (e.g., they are evangelical, but not necessarily charismatic) and strategies (e.g., prepare for change; foster learning), using specific examples and quotes. Sidebars (entitled "What Would Andy Grove Do?"; "What Would Jack Welch Do?" etc.) break up the text. This is a smart, timely book that deserves reading for the lessons it teaches and for the business history it inadvertently imparts.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Do seven of the most admired, most studied, and most quoted CEOs in the twenty-first century have no new knowledge to impart about their successes? Krames has created a new spin for the lessons from names such as Michel Dell and Jack Welch (plus five others) by fashioning a case-history-like approach. He sets the stage by isolating the six traits critical to great CEO success, from instilling a company-wide outside-in perspective to understanding the role of culture and how difficult it is to bring about meaningful cultural change. Then each of the seven CEOs is "assigned" a specific lesson. For example, Southwest's success in creating a performance-driven culture is introduced by a fictional business problem, headlined "What Would Herb Kelleher do?" and followed by a history of the airlines, the problem's answer, additional questions, and a synopsis of points to remember. Post-Enron, any corporate captain of industry can be tarnished; on the other hand, these lessons could remain valuable for years to come. Barbara Jacobs
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: McGraw-Hill
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0071382402
• ISBN 13: 9780071382403
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 204