How to Run a Company: Lessons from Top Leaders of the CEO Academy

LESSONS FOR EVERYONE IN BUSINESS FROM AN ALL-STAR TEAM

Every six months Dennis C. Carey and Marie-Caroline von Weichs run the CEO Academy, an immersion course for newly appointed CEOs of the world’s leading companies—what Business Week called a “boot camp” for the next class of top executives. Those attending get a priceless range of unvarnished advice and invaluable lessons from an all-star team of veteran CEOs about how to get the results they were hired to achieve.

What participants pay $10,000 to hear is now contained in this book, the insights and secrets of some of the most influential business leaders of our time. Here is advice from high-caliber businesspeople such as Larry Bossidy, the recently retired CEO of Honeywell International; Ray Gilmartin, the CEO of Merck; John Smale, the former chairman of General Motors and retired chairman and CEO of Procter & Gamble; and John Dasburg, who has run Northwest Airlines, Burger King, and now DHL Airways.

Successful CEOs aren’t the only attraction. How to Run a Company also presents America’s leading business observers and watchdogs: Nell Minow, the shareholder rights activist; Ira Millstein, the legendary attorney and power broker; Matthew Bishop, business editor of The Economist; and Joseph Badaracco, Harvard Business School’s top professor of ethics.

The combined team offers original and revealing observations on how business leaders at the top of the corporate world tackle pressing challenges, such as:

• How an industrial goliath like DuPont dramatically shifted its business focus
• How The Home Depot changed from fast-growing, free-wheeling adolescence to the management discipline that will help it mature and continue to expand
• What Michael Armstrong, who oversaw the transformation of Hughes Electronics and AT&T, advises to companies whose core business begins to disappear
• How the CEO of Tyco moved quickly during his first 100 days to build a new senior management team and began to restore trust in a company battered by scandal and bad publicity
• The role of the board of directors and how corporate governance should be reformed
• What strategies Jack Welch’s investor relations team at GE used to constantly probe who was buying the stock, who wasn’t, and why

How to Run a Company is not just for CEOs, but anyone interested in the critical make-or-break factors in today’s ever-challenging business environment. As the demands and expectations in business become ever greater and the competition tougher, here in one volume is the accumulated wisdom and experience of people who have been in the trenches during a remarkable time. How to Run a Company is the success manual for the twenty-first century.

DENNIS C. CAREY is vice chairman of Spencer Stuart, U.S., and has recruited CEOs and directors for some of the largest global companies. He is the founder of G100 and the CEO Academy, and the coauthor of CEO Succession and The Human Side of M&A.

MARIE-CAROLINE VON WEICHS is CEO of G100 and dean of the CEO Academy.