Elizabeth I, CEO: Strategic Lessons from the Leader Who Built an Empire (Hardcover)

~ Ph.D., Alan Axelrod (Author), (Author) "The last year of the old century, 1999, witnessed the usual Hollywood harvest of movies, most bulging with the requisite stock of car chases, explosions,..." (more)
Key Phrases: enforcing uniformity, religious uniformity, Privy Council, Queen of Scots, Edward Seymour (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Recently, we have seen England's venerable Queen Elizabeth I portrayed in popular movies as both a wise supporting character and powerful leading lady. Now, thanks to historian and author Alan Axelrod, we can not only see the 16th-century monarch as a single woman who turned the fortunes of an entire nation around--we can apply many of the traits and practices of Good Queen Bess to our own business lives. "You can learn that being a leader is being a leader, whether your enterprise is a Renaissance kingdom, a small business, a major corporation, a corporate department, or a three-person work group with a job to do," Axelrod writes in Elizabeth I, CEO. Like other authors who relate the conduct and writings of a historical figure to situations in the modern world (including himself in Patton on Leadership), Axelrod uses Elizabeth's behavior and words to frame a blueprint for corporate survival, personal image building, staff development, control, and--ultimately--success. The author draws 136 pointers from Elzabeth's life, each amplified with lively, germane anecdotes. Among them: "Control the Message, not the Messenger," "No Leader Is a Solo Act," and "Forgive, but Don't Forget." --Howard Rothman

From Publishers Weekly

Who could possibly offer better leadership lessons than one of the most powerful women in history? Axelrod (Patton on Leadership, etc.) details more than 100 leadership principles based on Queen Elizabeth's style of statesmanship. Having assumed the throne during a time of economic and religious turmoil, she helped rebuild England and strengthen its position in the world during her four decades as queen. Some of the lessons drawn from her reign are simplistic and obvious, such as "Knowledge Really Is Power," based on the queen's voracious appetite for reading and her study of Greek and Latin. "Keep a Clear Head and an Even Keel" derives from the monarch's ability to hold her temper; during difficult negotiations, she would occasionally leave the room to walk outside. Other lessons deserve more attention from today's executives, such as "Make a Spectacle of Yourself": Axelrod avers that a leader must motivate employees with more than the bottom line, and that theatrical gestures can be an effective source of inspiration. In a similar vein, Axelrod exhorts, "Be a Great Communicator": "An effective leader thinks about what he says, carefully crafting each utterance of any significance." While history fans will enjoy the brief portraits of Queen Elizabeth's governing style in various circumstances, those seeking penetrating management insights may be disappointed that not every lesson applies equally to today's corporate leaders. $200,000 ad/promo; 3-city tour; 20-city radio satellite tour.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 274 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall Press; 1ST edition (September 5, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0735201897
• ISBN-13: 978-0735201897
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #432,382 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #14 in	Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( E ) > Elizabeth I
  #17 in	Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Historical > British > Elizabeth I

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars First draw your conclusions - then plot the data., November 24, 2002

By	Maureen Ogorman "leneker" (USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Elizabeth I CEO: Strategic Lessons from the Leader Who Built an Empire (Audio Cassette)

Those who do not learn their history are doomed to repeat it, but those who learn it badly are doomed to write books about it.

Elizabeth I is an amazing figure on the historical stage. She took a confused country and made a great nation out of it. Her guidance and tolerance in religious matters made her one of the greatest monarchs of all times. She was a woman on the throne at a time when most women could not hope to have their opinions taken seriously. In times of crisis she rallied her armies to defend the nation she ruled and despite much religious strife she earned the loyalty of both her protestant and catholic subjects.

Alan Axelrod makes an attempt to carry forward her leadership secrets into wisdom we can all use today. Sadly, he seems to have written the book first and then filled in the blanks about the history. Each chapter Axelrod gives a quick overview of the topic to be covered and then gives the "leadership secret" followed by an anecdote to illustrate the point.
A fictitious example would be :
" 108 Eat Your Veggies"
"As Queen of England, Elizabeth often received letters from Mary Queen of Scots, saying how much she hated broccoli. In the end Elizabeth had Mary's head chopped off and the letters stopped."

Sounds good? Well in practice it falls flat. First problem was that there seems to not be enough secrets to go around so they repeat. Topics like `loyalty', `gratitude', `remember others', and 'be thankful' are all very much the same as Axelrod presents them and don't bear the amount of repetition that he gives them. Each time there is another anecdote but their aim is all the same.

Another sticking point I, of course, the fact that some of the history is inconvenient and so has to be worked around. There is a point about avoiding playing favorites illustrated with Elizabeth having to execute her erstwhile favorite the earl of essex and how she learned the error of her ways and never did it again. In fact the reign of Elizabeth I is littered with her playing favorites most notably Robert Dudley. The blatant favor she showed him was a major factor in destabilizing her privy council on more than one occasion.

The lesson on taking responsibility likewise falls flat. One example not given is how Elizabeth signed the death warrant for her cousin Mary Queen of Scots and the repudiated it as soon as she was executed. She threw some of her loyal servants in the tower for following her orders and wrote to all the European Monarchs to deny her responsibility. I wonder how that one never made it into the book.

Many other facts of her reign are likewise skipped when they prove to be contrary to the author's intention. Her life and times were filled with many issues and problems unlike modern day. While there are many insights that can be gleaned from her life, they are not well presented in this book.

There are a lot of great books on leadership in the market and lot of great books on history. This one is neither.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A severe disappointment, June 23, 2001

By	BigD (Providence) - See all my reviews

I read Alan Axelrod's "Patton on Leadership" last year and found the book to be a witty, informative primer on management, so I naturally looked forward to this, the second installment in his opus. I couldn't have been more disappointed. This book seems to have been thrown together in such haste that it hardly seems to constitute more than the margin notes from "Patton." The prose is tedious and labored, and the information contained within it rather trite. I'm not an expert on English history of this period and at the very least, I figured I'd learn something on this front, but even as history the book fails. Its presentation is bland, confusing, and often seems rather sugar-coated. Most irritating to me of all, however, is that the book's title is somewhat misleading. The subtitle refers to "the leader who built an empire" but all throughout the book, Axelrod coyly dances around this issue without lucidly identifying what he's talking about. He refers to the enormous empire stretching from North America to India upon which "the sun never set," but this was in the 1800s; Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, and I was curious to know what part of the empire had been initiated at that point. Yet all throughout the book, all I got was confusion and frustration on this issue. I later dusted off my old history textbook from sophomore year and found out why: The Jamestown Settlement in 1607 (along with the Pilgrims about a decade later) was the first overseas colony the British even started, and the "empire-building" phase apparently didn't begin until Cromwell's Commonwealth period, about half a century later. So by the time the Queen's reign came to a close, England hadn't even begun settling, much less initiated the "building of an empire" (unless Ireland is considered to be the start of the "empire," which if anything was a case study in mismanagement-- perhaps why Axelrod conveniently glosses over it in this book). This especially ticked me off, because I felt as though I'd wasted a whole weekend reading this book. If you're interested in a book of this type, then read "Patton on Leadership"-- don't bother with the sequel.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Provides little that is new or educational, April 11, 2001

By	Bookworm (USA) - See all my reviews

Alan Axelrod's book adds relatively little to the well-trammeled ground of self-help and business advice books already on the market. There are a few useful sections (as on the need for restraint in bestowing honors), but generally the book merely repackages the same old refrains: variations on the importance of good timing, resource allocation, command structure, etc. The author uses an incident from Queen Elizabeth's early experiences to point out the need to focus on "what's really important," but in this and other cases it just seems like cliched sayings for which he could have offered up hundreds of historical figures as examples. Moreover, there were undoubtedly quite a few successes during the Queen's reign (which Axelrod cites) but it wasn't the uniformly cheerful picture that he presents here. The war with Spain continued for 16 agonizing, inconclusive years beyond the Spanish Armada, spawning corruption at home to meet its costs and widening to become a painful guerrilla war in Ireland. And, there was no empire by reign's end; the first long-term English settlements sprang up later in the 17th century, and the expansive overseas empire did not begin to form until much later, after many wars with France in the 1700s. Had the author analyzed these policies to examine where they succeeded and where they fell short, he would have written a thoughtful, useful, and nuanced book that would have been informative as a management guide, but without this the book instead comes off as superficial and not very helpful.