The Leadership Investment: How the World's Best Organizations Gain Strategic Advantage through Leadership Development [Hardcover]

Robert M. Fulmer (Author), Marshall Goldsmith (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 27, 2000

How the World's Best Organizations Gain Strategic Advantage through Leadership Development

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Fulmer is a professor of management at the College of William and Mary and the co-author of Leadership by Design. Goldsmith is a leadership consultant and writer. Their book is based on the authors' work with corporate executives, business academics, and people in consulting firms that specialize in leadership development. It draws from data from a 1998-1999 research study involving Arthur Andersen, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, Johnson & Johnson, Royal Dutch Shell, and the World Bank. Thirty-five other businesses participated in the study by attending a planning session, completing data-gathering surveys, and attending or hosting on-site interviews. They included the AARP, Allstate Insurance, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, the Lutheran Brotherhood, Sprint, the U.S. Treasury, and the U.S. Postal Service. The book offers an overview of the optimum practices in leadership development, citing a number of approaches. George Cohen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From the Author

The Leadership Investment

Robert Fulmer and I have based The Leadership Investment on our work with senior corporate executives, business academics, and principals in consulting firms that specialize in leadership development. We are certain that this book will be of value to anyone interested in gaining the ultimate source of competitive advantage--“an ability to learn faster than the competition.”

As a founding director of Keilty, Goldsmith & Company, I’ve been actively involved as a consultant to many of the best practice partners included in this book. The Leadership Investment includes the conclusions of more than a decade of my focus on the characteristics that will be required for leadership in the future.

The Leadership Investment incorporates ten years of invaluable research conducted by my co-author with such organizations as Columbia University, the MIT Center for Organizational learning, The College of William and Mary, America Society for Training and Development (ASTD), and America Productivity and Quality Center (APQC). The book emphasizes the findings of two studies: a global best-practices study sponsored by APQC and ASTD; and a subsequent study concerning the organizational development of leaders at all levels.

In this book, we explore how some of the world’s best corporations have invested time, money, and energy to the development of leaders within their organizations, because in today’s rapidly changing world the key determinant of any company’s long-term success is effective leadership.

--Marshall Goldsmith

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: AMACOM; 1st edition (October 27, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0814405584
• ISBN-13: 978-0814405581
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,734,086 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars LEADING THE CORPORATE REVOLUTION, December 13, 2000

By 

Laroi M. Lawton "level9" (New York City) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Leadership Investment: How the World's Best Organizations Gain Strategic Advantage through Leadership Development (Hardcover)

The Leadership Investment is all about greater expectations for potential leaders in the corporate environment. Utilizing some of the better companies in the business world today, Robert Fulmer and Marshall Goldsmith offer concrete examples and guides for producing an educational program within your corporation that will increase productivity and loyalty. Globalization of the economy, increasingly complex technology demands, the need to drive corporate strategy, the Internet, and e-commerce - these are just some of the forces pressing today's managers, CIO's and CEO's. Clearly, the very concept of what it means to be any of the aforementioned is undergoing a radical transformation. Now more than ever, corporate leadership is being asked - no, required to master many areas. Training and education programs are a must according to authors Fulmer and Marshall. Drawing on research done with a number of well known corporations such as Johnson & Johnson, HP, GE, Saturn and the World Bank, just to name a few, old style managers are becoming extinct, if not outdated. Based on their research, the authors indicate that today's managers are being asked to substantially increase their participation in shaping the strategic direction of the company, to accepting more responsibility for initiating business change projects and to become more aggressive in introducing new technology into the organization. Corporate universities are a strategic force that any company big or small must invest in, if they intend their managers, CIO's, CEO's and employees to become new-economy leaders.

5.0 out of 5 stars Invaluable Insights, October 11, 2000

By 

"sarahmizrachi" (San Diego, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Leadership Investment: How the World's Best Organizations Gain Strategic Advantage through Leadership Development (Hardcover)

The Leadership Investment gives invaluable insights into the executive development and education programs of some of the best companies in the world. Each chapter delves deeply into the benefits of offering education programs, how these programs are set up in six of the world¹s top companies, and how the programs continue to grow and change with the times. These first chapters are a helpful guide to any company looking into setting up a corporate education program. Perhaps the most interesting sections of the book are the sections on leadership development firms and corporate universities, in that these sections reveal an alternative route to executive development. This book will be incredibly useful to any company in its efforts to set up a leadership development program.