Customer Reviews

Lessons from the Top : The Search for America's Best Business Leaders

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

The authors -- with Spencer Stuart (www.spencerstuart.com) -- had access to some distinguished (Lou Gerstner; Andy Grove, Bill Gates) and some not so distinguished (Bernie Ebbers, Ken Lay) CEOs, and they used Gallup to conduct series of interviews and polls trying to get some insights as to what makes some CEOs successful. What the authors produce are a series of capsules (2-4 pages for each CEO) which are descriptive of the CEOs and companies but have very little analysis.

It is in failing to use the resources at their disposal and access to some remarkable people to draw significant insights, that makes for the biggest shortfall of the book. One may just as well read a description of the CEOs or the companies in a business magazine or the Wall Street Journal.

There are no unique insights to be gained from this book. Yes, some of the CEOs provide some discussion points based on their experience, but much of the space is devoted to their company's specific problems at a particular time (thus leaders of questionable integrity, such as Ebbers and Lay were included).

What in my opinion the authors should have done is go above the specific company experience and focus on the qualities of these interesting individuals and show what has allowed them to have such significant impact on the business world and out society.

Unfortunately such insights are absent from the book. What a pity!

I have read a lot of business books about leadership. While most of them have been interesting, they have also been a little dry because the references to real people have only been used by way of example. Therefore, I liked this book because it allowed me to spend a liitle time with 50 people that one has to respect and acknowledge for their accomplishments. They have had to do something right in order to achieve what they have. But, then the book takes these 50 real life experiences and distills it down into a framework and a few basic lessons that helps all these individual experiences make sense within the larger scheme of things. People might say that there is nothing new here, only common sense notions, yet until one sees things within a larger picture or framework that ties things together, these are just disjointed ideas with little context, synergy or power to change. I can apply these lessons for the top to my own life situation and career and that makes the book work for me.

Among the many books which examine "America's best business leaders", this is one of the best-written and most informative. Part I consists of three chapters: What Makes Business Leaders Great, Evaluating Today's Business Leaders, and Methodology: A Closer Look at the Numbers. The authors then proceed to 50 "Profiles" in Part II, beginning (in alphabetical order) with Mike Armstrong (AT&T) and concluding with Jack Welch (GE). Part III consists of three chapters: The 51st Business Leader: Peter Drucker, Doing the Right Things Right: A New Definition of Business Success, and Common Traits: A Prescription for Success in Business. The reader is then provided with three Appendices to supplement and enrich the material which precedes them. So much for the book's organization.

There are several reasons why I rate this book so highly. First, as previously indicated, it is exceptionally well-written. Also, each of the 50 "Profiles" probes deeply into the specific talents and skills of its subject. Biographical information and quotations supplement the authors' own analyses. Moreover, each "Profile" illustrates a key point. For example, the discussion of Bill Steere (Pfizer) illuminates the implications of his assertion that "Fads come. Fads go. We concentrate on what we do best." In the "Profile" of him, Jack Welch observes "I don't think anyone appreciates the value of informal." Obviously, Welch does. I also was very impressed by the quality of the content of Part III. The discussion of Peter Drucker is among the most insightful I have ever read. The authors redefine "business success in the next chapter and then review the "common traits" of the 50 great business leaders they have analyzed. For those who are eager to learn, the "lessons" identified and then discussed by Neff and Citrin are invaluable.

This book profiles both Bernie Ebbers (Worldcom) and Kenneth Lay (Enron), along with other CEOs. It lauds them all with fulsome praise, scattered with homespun aphorisms of the type normally found in Readers' Digest, and interleaved with down-home anecdotes and capsule corporation summaries that tell you nothing about running a business.

Much of the book is devoted to describing how the book came about; it's how the book starts and how it ends.

The book may be worth reading just for its list; which profiled and praised CEO will be next to turn out to be fatally flawed?
Another reader's description of 'corporate dribble' is concise and accurate.

This book is a valuable reference and a good read. The leaders featured come from diverse industries and have diffirent leadership and management philosophies.

Helpful in a host of circumstances and Highly recommended to anyone serious about business.

In skimming through this at the bookstore I thought it was a "can't miss." Turns out it could miss.

I praise the author's strategy in that they assemble a wonderful group of leaders and pick their brain on a variety of issues - great for the average reader. The problem is that the data they gathered is pretty much raw data and needs some analysis to translate it into actionable findings. This isn't done until the end, and in my opinion, should have been 50% of the book, not 5%.

With everyone crunched for time, there are other business books that will provide better, more concise information. Save your time unless you have too much of it :)

The sub-title of this book is "The Search for America's Best Business Leaders." That's misleading, but it kind of makes sense, given the folks who put the book together. The authors are principles of Spencer Stuart, an executive search firm.

They should be in a pretty good position to identify top business leaders and to study some of the factors that make them successful. They do, in fact, identify what they say are fifty of the best business leaders in America at the time the book was written.

It would make more sense if the subtitle were something like "Interviews with Fifty of America's Top Business Leaders." That would be much more like truth in advertising.

It would deal with the problem of identifying these folks as THE best business leaders. These are fifty folks who were viewed as top business leaders at the time the book was written.

As the authors say, that list is fluid and no single search could probably uncover all of the top business leaders. The folks listed here are leaders who've been covered by the business press. You won't find top leaders from smaller companies, or even leaders from big companies that haven't gotten much press coverage.

The list is also fixed in time. Bernie Ebbers, Hank Greenberg, Dennis Kozlowski and Ken Lay, all are on the list. They probably wouldn't be today, unless you were compiling a list of famous felons.

This book gives you an interview with each of fifty folks who were viewed as very successful business leaders. Each one talks about where they work and what they do and what matters to them. That's what this book is really about and why it's valuable.

What you've got here is fifty selections of wisdom and insight from people who are successful in business. They are articulate and insightful people. The represent a broad range of personal styles and backgrounds. And they're valuable because we know how some of their stories came out.

In addition to the felons, there are other folks on this list who aren't doing what they did back then. Jack Welch and Larry Bossidy have both moved from CEO to guru. Michael Eisner and Lou Gerstner have retired.

Read this book for the individual insights. All of the survey stuff that surrounds the interviews is just there to flesh out the book and make it look scientific.

Don't read this book all the way through. Dip into it and read a couple of interviews at a time and compare them. Mark passages that are insightful or inspiring for you and go back to them.

It's a book worth reading, but not for the reasons stated on the book's cover and not because all the folks in it turned out to be either top performers or stellar human beings. It's worth reading because it gives you a view into the minds of fifty folks who've made it to the top.

James Citrin and Thomas Neff compile a set of business anecdotes from the results of their exhaustive surveying, hoping to convey the important lessons of 50 of America's top business leaders. Each leader profile has interesting personal details, a leadership "philosophy" to lead off the profile, and examples to help detail how the profile has made them successful.

What's particularly telling is that all the Leaders are chosen based upon the authors model of what a good business leader is -- that is, they "load" the deck by having asked who is first to come to mind when specific categorical questions are asked, such as "commitment to diversity". (They included the questions used in the initial survey, which was used to narrow the field to 50 Leaders.) Note, however, that leadership in management has been defined as how well they are able to get people to willingly adopt, follow and achieve their vision, and these questions ask nothing of that.

Also, it's weighed by company financial statements and "fame" of Leaders. Smaller companies with great Leaders will not get mentioned. For example, there is a small company in Los Angeles, that, in 2000, earned $500,000.00 per employee, by putting customers first, employees second and ownership last. Insisting that continued education was paramount to the success of the company, he sent a young manager to his alma mater, CalTech, for post-graduate work. He was always heard saying: "Customers first! Change is good! Have fun!" and his employees followed suite and found ingenious ways to improve quality, save money and enjoy work -- and they did it because they loved the president. That's LEADERSHIP.

The real surprise among smaller surprises is that an astonishing number of Leaders did not stay at their jobs for long (although, an equally astonishing number have been at the same company virtually all of their career). This suggests that loyalty is not a Leadership trait. (Note also that most of the companies had been wildly successful, long before the Leader arrived.) Another surprise is that very few of the Leaders earned advanced degrees, some earning honorary degrees (perhaps for charitable contributions to the school?). The richest man in the world, Bill Gates, didn't graduate from college??? Just shows how having a spectacular product will make you look like a great leader (Disney! Mobil! Campbell's Soup!) Why, even disgraced Enron CEO Ken Ley is among the Great.

What wasn't a surprise is that most Leaders attributed their success to a customer-based, quality-driven philosophy. That is, what quality professionals have known all along (and said much more succinctly by Eli Goldratt): the key to making money now and in the future is to make customers happy now and in the future (and making employees and suppliers happy now and in the future). Read Dr. Deming's 14 Points, and you'll see that every Leadership trait described in this book is accounted for in Deming's quality philosophies.

"Write what you want to read" was advice given to the authors, but was it sage advice? The book, 430 pages long, reads like a 50 section fluff piece on people that may not have given them the time of day, but not for being raised to the stature of 50 Best. The first three chapters, which outline the surveying and the structure of the book only show how eager the authors are to make nice with the big boys. They should've discarded the advice, and taken some from the Leaders: "write what your CUSTOMERS want to read".

Last comment: the Lesson Learned, supposedly a synopsis of what can be gleaned from the Leaders profiles, sums it up with Six Core Principles, strangely without mentioning the most frequently mentioned Leadership mantra "Please your customer". With that glaring omission, I can't see how the authors learned any Lessons from the Top.

"If you want to learn what makes someone successful, you want to go directly to the source..." This is the source. Especially valuable because it doesn't offer a single "right" way but surveys a range of situation-specific leadership styles, this book well written and insightful.

Citrin and Neff have succeeded in the nearly impossible -- achieving remarkable access into America's corner office where they divined the essence of what got (and keeps) the best of the best corporate leaders to (and at) the top. This is a readable and humane primer that is rigorous in its analysis to boot.