Ultimate Leadership: Winning Execution Strategies for Your Situation

To succeed, leaders must understand and apply the core principles of leadership--but that’s not enough. You need to shape your approach for any unique situation. Too many leaders don’t know how to do that--and that’s why they fail. Ultimate Leadership shows how to adapt the principles of leadership to different challenges, contexts, and organizations.

Russell E. Palmer--who has had three very different, highly successful careers as head of one of the world’s largest accounting firms, Dean of the Wharton School, and an entrepreneur--helps you identify the leadership model most appropriate for your environment, and how to lead accordingly. You’ll learn better ways to lead your equals, help an organization weather crises, transform its culture, lead entrepreneurial organizations, lead global organizations...even lead non-profit and academic institutions.

Then, drawing on interviews with an extraordinary spectrum of outstanding leaders, Palmer helps you master the attribute every leader must have: the ability to inspire your unique organization, even in the face of the most daunting challenges.

• Achieving empowerment, even in classic "top-down" organizations

Exercising strong authority without falling victim to ego or closed-mindedness

• Transforming an organization of peers

Driving changes in a strategic direction when key power centers disagree

• Turning danger into opportunity

Mastering the art of rapid, focused, hands-on execution for organizations in crisis

• Leading cultural change that sticks

Reconnecting structures, processes, and strategies with the new realities you face

• Learning from the Wharton experience

Succeeding in an environment with widely diverse, highly influential stakeholders

Russell E. Palmer is the owner and Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of The Palmer Group, a corporate investment firm located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Before founding his own firm, he served as Dean of the Wharton School for seven years and prior to that he served for ten years as Managing Partner and CEO of Touche Ross & Co. (now Deloitte & Touche), an accounting and consulting firm. He became CEO of Touche Ross at age 37, the youngest person ever to attain that position in what is now the “Big Four” accounting firms.

 

After 27 years in the accounting and consulting profession, Mr. Palmer became Dean of the Wharton School. As the tenth Dean, and the first to come from the private sector, he shared his management experience with MBA students in a leadership course that he developed. He was instrumental in attracting more than 100 new faculty members to the School, building a new executive education program and complex and raising more than $125 million for the School. When he retired, the school was consistently ranked number one in undergraduate business education and in the top three MBA graduate programs.

 

In his current career with The Palmer Group, he has acquired more than thirty companies with the majority being in the educational field. All of these acquisitions have been successful investments, with the latest divestiture being a proprietary school group that was sold for $120 million.

 

Active in the outside business community, Mr. Palmer has served on 12 New York Stock Exchange boards, including Honeywell International, Inc., Verizon Communications, Inc., The May Department Stores Company, The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, and Bethlehem Steel Corporation. He is a Trustee Emeritus of the University of Pennsylvania, a Trustee of the National Constitution Center, and a Member of the Smithsonian National Board.

 

Mr. Palmer graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree, cum laude, from Michigan State University, and has received several honorary degrees. He has written and lectured extensively. His articles and essays have appeared in Business Week, the New York Times, the Journal of Accountancy, and other publications.