What the CEO Really Wants from You

There are many books on leadership and how to lead. What the CEO Really Wants from You addresses the one key question that is uppermost in the mind of any manager: What should he or she do to make the boss a partner rather than perceive the boss as an extractor of work or an adversary? As Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever, points out in his foreword, partnerships with others, but above all, with your direct boss and organization, are more important than ever before. Few people are so well qualified as R. Gopalakrishnan to guide us on this journey. This is a book that will be of immense value to all managers, and one that just might evoke pragmatic answers to the question of what the CEO really expects from the team.

R. Gopalakrishnan brings his rich management experience to this book. He has worked in international and Indian companies, has lived in India and abroad, and has developed a global perspective about business and people. Gopal has worked for forty-five years as a professional manager from 1967 onwards: thirty-one in Unilever and fourteen in Tata. Currently he is Director, Tata Sons Limited. He had served Unilever as Chairman of Unilever Arabia, as Managing Director of Brooke Bond Lipton India, and as Vice-Chairman of Hindustan Lever Limited. Gopal studied physics at St. Xavier's Calcutta, engineering at IIT Kharagpur, and also attended the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School. He has earlier authored The Case of the Bonsai Manager: Lessons for Managers on Intuition (2007) and When the Penny Drops: Learning What Is Not Taught (2010). He has delivered guest lectures in India and abroad and his articles have been published widely. He has taught a credit course entitled LWNT: Learning What's Not Taught at leading management institutions. He is a past president of the All-India Management Association.