Customer Reviews

Aesop and the CEO: Powerful Business Lessons from Aesop and America's Best Leaders

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As an avid reader of business and management-oriented titles, I found Aesop and the CEO thoroughly engaging. The central concept draws parallels between Aesop's timeless fables and case studies from the modern business cannon, illuminating some simple truths found in both.

Aesop and the CEO covers a broad range of subjects, in easy to digest chapters. I personally enjoyed the sections on management, leadership and motivation. It was unusual to find "lessons learned" by business, political, sports and cultural leaders (including Mary K. Ash, Rudolph Giuliani, Ulysses S. Grant, Edward Deming, the Beatles and a local hardware store) all in one volume. The book is uniformly well written and a fast read.

The "morals" drawn from Aesop's stories and the business cases recounted in each chapter are widely applicable to today's social, business, civic and professional endeavors. These lessons will stimulate the reader's personal re-evaluation of past experiences and provide a richer perspective for future decision making.

This book is appropriate for for the casual reader seeking a refresher on some of life's simple truths, the experienced manager searching for insights on unifying and motivating teams, and marketers or senior executives charged with defining strategic direction for their product line or business.

Within the limits of this genre which Noonan clearly recognizes, his book is far superior to so many others which also use a prominent historical figure as a source of business wisdom. (For example, Caligula on Values-Driven Leadership.) He carefully organizes his material within nine sections and employs the same format for each. In "Winning Business Strategies," for example, he examines seven of Aesop's fables in terms of (a) a contemporary CEO and/or company and (b) the key lesson to be learned from that fable:

"The Lion, the Bear, and the Fox": Michael Dell demonstrates that sometimes new opportunities exist even in a fiercely competitive society.

"The Fox and the Cat": Dunkin Donuts demonstrates that an organization should not be distracted from what it does best.

"The Fox and the Lion": The success of a small hardware store in direct competition with Home Depot demonstrates that, sometimes, it is both sensible and prudent to find ways to cooperate with the competition.

"The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing": General Patton's invasion of Italy demonstrates that a sound plan executed today is preferable to a perfect plan that's too late.

"The Ant and the Grasshopper": W. Edwards Deming's first principle of management demonstrates that effective long-term planning is the key to survival and eventual success.

"The Farmer and His Sons": Warren Bennis' use of Avis Rent a Car demonstrates that having an appropriate vision will enable everyone involved to know the business inside and out.

Finally, "The Eagle and the Beetle": Ulysses S. Grant's attack on Fort Donelson demonstrates the importance of determining how to get ahead of the competition...and then stay there.

Note the variety of situations, yes, but also the diversity of focal points which range from Dell through Patton and Deming to Grant. The same can be said of each of the other sections. Who else has identified correlations between "The Donkey Eating Thistles" and Mary Kay Ash, Peggy Noonan, and Sumner Redstone? Between "The Fox and the Crow" and Dale Carnegie and Paul Harvey? Between "The Fox and the Goat" and [The] Donald Trump? Highly entertaining material, to be sure, and certainly cleverly presented. However, the business lessons (albeit obvious) are worthy of reiteration and seem so much more vital when each is anchored within an unexpected context.

To David Noonan I now offer an appreciative "Well-done!"

This little masterpiece of a book is an absolute gem. Marketed as a business book, Noonan has taken a very clever premise -- using the "wisdom" inherent in Aesop's familiar fairy tales -- and structured a book dense with wisdom and extremely entertaining and thought-provoking stories and anecdotes.

Similar to the classic The Elements of Style, which very concisely tells you everything you need to know about grammar and writing, "Aesop and the CEO" succinctly addresses the entire realm of business: hiring and firing, employee rewards, marketing, sales, etc. Each topic is kept to a page or two, and Noonan presents the nugget front and center: no searching required. The true genius of the book is how an animal-based story from 2000 years ago is paired with a current, well-known business figure (Sam Walton, Bill Gates, Howard Johnson, Donald Trump, etc.) through which it becomes clear that truths are timeless, although the names change.

This much alone would have resulted in a book that is well worth the modest price. But what made the book so memorable to me were the compelling vignettes, anecdotes, and stories that were used to provide context to the lessons. Similarly to The Tipping Point, a book with an interesting premise that was made so much more vivid and memorable through the use of great story-telling, Noonan's tome has catapulted itself from being "merely" a business book to an instruction manual about life itself by its master storytelling. It is quite simply a suberb effort.

This book is not the last we will hear from Mr. Noonan, I suspect. [Nor is it the first: he also co-authored a textbook called Groundwater Remediation and Petroleum (no doubt a best seller!)] I for one cannot wait for his next effort.

David Noonan's latest work is brilliant in concept and execution. Noonan has dusted off the 2000+ year old fables of Aesop, accomplished the scholarly research, and demonstrated in a succint yet very readable style that the wisdom of ancients holds true today. A "must read" for students and practitioners of leadership.

This is such a novel idea of using a simple moral from one of the two hundred published fables written by Aesop and applying it to fairly recent situations, adjusting to modern times. David Noonan did a remarkable job of pairing the appropriate fable with its corresponding moral to a short story of his own from today's business world with his own "business moral."

The biographical history behind Aesop's Fables, thought to have been intended as children's easy-to-understand literature is what caught my attention. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Even though he gave the animals human traits, as C. S. Lewis did in THE NARDIA CHRONICLES, they were meant for adults and gained wide recognition as they were passed along for centuries through oral (word of moutn, as many of his companions could not read) tradition. His start in life was lowly, born into slavery in 620 B.C. as a hunchback with a speech impediment. His early years were spent on the Balkan Peninsula, a part of Turkey, where "slaves toiled hard as miners, plantation workers, or if they were lucky, household servants. It was possible [then] for a slave to earn freedom (called manumission) through diligent work and loyal service." Freed slaves were permitted to "engage in civic affairs and to travel wherever they wanted."

Aesop served two masters during his enslavement, but was eventually granted his freedom because of his "intelligence, wit and tact as a servant." As he traveled and observed how underlings were treated, he began his story-telling (with morals) and, after a time, "his reputation grew as a wise and 'noble' man." He went to Sardis in Asia Minor where the King sent him on diplomatic missions to Athens and Corinth, and he used his fables to calm tensions. Because of his keen mind, tactfulness and honesty, the King trusted him to distribute a large amount of gold fairly to the citizens of Delphi, which at that time was "the home of the Oracle and the most influential religious sanctuary in ancient Greece." He was unjustly murdered by being thrown off a cliff around 560 B.C.

The people of Delphi eventually atoned and made amends for their crime against Aesop. "Lysippus, a famous Greek sculptor, immortalized the fabulist by erecting a statue to him in Athens." In 300 B.C., two hundred of his fables were compiled in written form as ASSEMBLIES OF AESOP'S FABLES. "Three centuries later, another freed Greek slave named Phaedrus translated the collection of stories into Latin for a much broader audience. About AD 230, a Greek poet named Valerius Babrius combined fables from India with their Greek counterparts and published the entire collection of tales in the most widely read set of fables in world literature today and provides the context for the business tales" in this book.

And so, the forty-seven varied short stories included in this small volume are not all about companies, business conflcits and management; he also writes about war ("General Patton storms Sicily," "The best ship in the U. S. Navy...." and Colin Powell gets an uneasy feelin in Tehran"), sports, celebrities (Oprah Winfrey, Donald Trump, and Paul Harvey respectively), and politics ("The Founding Fathres make France an ally"). My favorite was about Lee Iacocca and his boss, Henry Ford II in 1975: "You can sit and wait and hope the situation improves, which is most people's first impulse, or you can make the first move and request a transfer or get another job before the ax fall." Business Moral: "Don't sit back and do nothing..."

"The world of business has changed enormously since Aesop's time, but people haven't. Now more than ever, there is a need for strong, ethical leadership and efficient management at every company level. Now more than ever, good people must step up and reaffirm that integrity, honesty, and goodness are as critical to a business' survival as a strong bottom line. So what better time than now in this post-Enron world to reintroduce the lessons taught by Aesop almost six hundred years before Christ?

David Noonan wrote an interesting business book built around a very creative organizational concept: using the timeless morals of forty-seven of Aesop's Fables to demonstrate the lessons currently needed for modern business success. However, I believe Noonan failed to apply the moral of one of the included Aesop's Fables, "The Lioness" - quality is more important than quantity - to live up to the potential of his innovative concept. I believe he tried to do too much, and as a result he gave me too little.

The book was organized into nine chapters or sections with business-related titles: Rewards and Incentives; Management and Leadership (Communicating Effectively);
Effective Management and Leadership (Fostering Teamwork and Controlling Stress);
Winning Business Strategies; Business Strategies That Failed; Human Resources (Conflict Resolution); Human Resources (Motivating and Inspiring); Marketing Products and Services; and Negotiations, Mergers, and Alliances. Within each chapter/section, were selected `fable packages' that consisted of a fable usually followed by Aesop's Moral, Perspective, Story/Anecdote, Business Moral, and Sources (when applicable).

Despite a solid approach, I found only ten of the forty-seven fables completely fit into his `fable package' organization. I was distracted and disappointed by too many disconnects from the chapter/section titles down to the business morals. Too often I was left wondering how we got from the fable to the business moral.

Although the book suffered from the poor execution of a good organizational concept, I sensed that Noonan is very passionate and knowledgeable about business and wanting to pass along lessons to help others how to succeed. I liked his easy writing style, and I thought some of his vignettes were excellent. The back of the book contains a superb bibliography with about seventy book and article references.

I enjoyed this book, but I believe it would have been much better if Noonan had focused more on the quality of the `fable packages' and less on the quantity. Such an approach would not only have improved my reading experience, but I believe it would have given Noonan a greater opportunity to present his business expertise in more depth and detail.