The Mind Of The CEO: The World's Business Leaders Talk About Leadership, Responsibility The Future Of The Corporation, And What Keeps Them Up At Night - Softcover

Garten, Jeffrey E

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0465026168 ISBN 13: 9780465026166

Publisher: Basic Books, 2001

Synopsis

Based on extensive and highly personal interviews with forty chief executives around the world-among them GE's Jack Welch, AOL's Steven Case, Intel's Andy Grove, Newscorp's Rupert Murdoch, BP Amoco's John Browne, Nokia's Jorma Olilla, and Toyota's Hiroshi Okuda-The Mind of the CEO takes us on a journey into the innermost thoughts of today's corporate titans and paints a compelling picture of the strategic and daily challenges facing them. Jeffrey Garten's findings are a challenge to those who are suspicious of corporate power, those who believe CEOs should focus only on enriching shareholders, and even to many CEOs who see their jobs much more narrowly. No one interested in the future can afford not to read, think about, and debate this book.

About this title

Review

Yale Management School dean and BusinessWeek columnist Jeffrey Garten has written a provocative if perhaps mistitled book. Billed as a "journey into the innermost thoughts of corporate titans," The Mind of the CEO is really about Garten's own thoughts. He makes no pretense at being objective, admitting: "I want to talk about the awesome challenges CEOs face as seen through what they said to me and as filtered through my own experiences and my own thoughts."

Garten uses his interviews with 40 household names--including Intel's Andy Grove, GE's Jack Welch, PepsiCo's Roger Enrico, and AOL's Steve Case--to articulate his own questions and strategies for CEOs to thrive during the "third Industrial Revolution." He interprets these interviews through the lens of his tenures on Wall Street, at Yale, and as President Clinton's Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade. Among the challenges he analyzes: what CEOs are doing (or must do) to win the Internet wars and meet the challenges of going global, why CEOs must emphasize the "true north" of consistent values, and how a shareholder is different from a stakeholder. With great clarity, he details the demise of several CEOs who resigned under pressure, including Aetna's Richard Huber and Xerox's Richard Thoman, and suggests that "a vision without execution is a hallucination."

Yet Garten's core concern--and one where he is most passionate--is how to expand the leadership role of CEOs on the world stage. He urges leaders to curb their ethnocentrism and to take more responsibility for creating a world environment in which everyone can prosper. By framing this issue of leaders as world citizens, Garten raises smart and searching questions for a wired world economy. --Barbara Mackoff

About the Author

Jeffrey E. Garten is dean of the Yale School of Management. He served as U.S. Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade from 1993 to 1995, and was previously a managing director of the Blackstone Group, a Wall Street investment firm. He is author of A Cold Peace: America, Japan, Germany and the Struggle for Supremacy and has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and Harvard Business Review. He and his wife, Ina, live in Connecticut and New York.

About this edition

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0465026168
• ISBN 13: 9780465026166
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320