The Wisdom of the CEO Book

Not many of us have the benefit of sitting down and picking the brains of top CEOs, the kind of guys who get their pictures on the covers of Forbes and Fortune and whose companies' quarterly earnings are reported on the evening news. Wisdom of the CEO doesn't exactly give you face time, but it does feature 29 corporate leaders talking about the issues that drive modern business--growth, innovation, shareholder value, and globalisation among them.Some of the names are those you'd expect--Michael Dell talking about growth, Sony's Nobuyuki Idea on innovation--but others are a surprise. For example, the postmaster general of the United States has written a chapter called "Firing Up the Evangelical Organization", in which he talks about the inherent contradictions of a company that is a monopoly but still has to compete for market share with publicly traded companies. The chapter on knowledge management comes last in the book, but contains the most interesting metaphor: Yahoo! chairman and CEO Timothy Koogle compares the proliferation of new information to bug spray, which works by forcing bugs to keep twitching until they run out of food or oxygen and thus die. Knowledge workers and organisations are like that, he says: if they can't find the information they need quickly, in language that's meaningful to them, they'll just keep searching until they run themselves into the ground. Not that this is a book built on clever metaphors. Two of the authors are partners with Pricewaterhouse Coopers, the giant accountancy firm, and the third is a former partner. A reader doesn't expect zinging prose from this trio, and shouldn't be disappointed when it's not found. Instead, the book offers straightforward analysis of how business has changed in the past two decades and how it figures to continue changing. --Lou Schuler, Amazon.comRead More