Customer Reviews

The Mind of the CEO

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

 

 

Nothing new here. The book was moderately interesting. As CEO of a company company based in the midwest, I was looking for real insight. This book offered nothing new and frankly ended on a sour note for me. Clearly, Jeffrey Garten is without any serious and current operational experience or he would understand how his liberal, government centric views don't work in today's business environment. Had Mr. Garten operated his own business for any period of time, he would know that it is more than a full-time job to satisfy investors/shareholders, staff, boards, customers and other interested parties - not to mention directing trade policy for the federal government. If private business spends more time leading public policy and less time in business, what would that do for shareholders, domestic and global economy? I especially enjoyed the part towards the end of the book where Garten, as "part of the first Clinton Administration", take credit for the end of the Cold War with Russia and tearing down the Berlin Wall - sorry attempt to take credit for something he nothing to do with as part of the U.S. Department of Commerce. This book is weak and I am sorry I took time out of my busy schedule to read about Garten's view of the world.

As other reviewers note, this book offers little insight into the internal workings of the CEO mind and is rather filled with trite quotations and the author's own speculations. One inescapable conclusion is that the reader searching for some wisdom among America's CEO's or deans of Yale's business school is likely to be disappointed. Perhaps rising to the top is neither evidence of some greater intellectual power nor of an ability to articulate novel ideas nor even of any particular talent. Rising to the top is more a reflection of one's ability to acquire and wield power and thus it should neither surprise nor disappoint us that the "leaders" at the top, both in business and academics, aren't all that smart. Perhaps that is the lesson from this trivial little work.

This pdf version misses a lot of pages. Not worth getting it.

Somehow a lot of books get published that contain at best useless advice and at worse propaganda that helps to perpetuate the gross inequalities of the American (and evr more so Global) corporate experience. As you read this review, please note that I'm not one of those fanatical, badly dressed, no-taste anti-globalization vandals.
The Mind of the CEO is shallow and this despite the fact that its author, Jeffrey Garten is the dean of the Yale School of management (I suppose i can kiss goodbye to my application for a Yale MBA). At the same time it is telling that much of the obtuse thinking that has invaded management circles in recent decades has roots in the very academic circles that are supposed to enlighten it with something deeper. Gartner interviews 40 of the world's 'top' (you'll gain a renewed appreciation of 'Bottom'when you read what 'top' is) to find out what makes their companies successful. Jack welch (who proves my point further with his new biographical masterpiece Jack), Jurgen Schrempp - an odd choice given his fiasco at Chrysler -, Andy Grove of Intel and other luminaries. The interviws or ' chats' only show how muddy corporate thinking is. Strategy is the most invoked word and none of the 40 stars says anything remotely different from each other. Some of the brilliant nuggets include "Consumers are going to want choices that make sense to them". "The next big step of going global is goping to be be going local". I only wish the CEO's would finally learn where they have to go. Someone should show them the way.
The ultimate and inadvertent message of the book is that CEO's have no more clues about the 'marketplace' than the rest of us and even less about innovations in management thinking. beware the next management technique, mission statement and seminar.
Unfortunately, being unoriginal and offering repackaged stale solutions earns CEO's several dollars and hero status.

In the Introduction, Garten explains that his objective is to share "the most important thoughts that run through the minds of some of the world's leaders as a group. I was looking for patterns from which to draw conclusions, patterns derived from what was said and what wasn't." He interviewed 40 prominent CEOs worldwide who include C. Michael Armstrong (AT&T), Michael Bloomberg (Bloomberg L.P.), Richard Branson, (Virgin Management Ltd.), Stephen M. Case (American Online, Inc.), Michael S. Dell (Dell Computer Corporation), Roger A, Enrico (PepsiCo, Inc.), Andrew S. Grove (Intel Corporation), Rupert Murdoch (The News Corporation Limited), Hiroshi Okuda (Toyota Motor Corporation), Jurgen E. Schrempp (DaimlerChrysler AG), George Soros ((Soros Fund Management LLC.), and John F. Welch, Jr. (General Electric Company). "I tried to come to grips with what I thought of the environment CEOs faced, how they were dealing with it, and what more, if anything, they ought to be doing."

This is a very revealing statement because it correctly suggests that the mind of Jeffrey E. Garten is as much involved in this book as are the minds of those CEOs he interviewed. Indeed, Garten shares several judgments of his own. For example, Garten asserts that global CEOs are not nearly as powerful as many people now assume as they struggle with three kinds of challenges amidst the third industrial revolution: "First, they have their hands full with the central strategic problems of how to take advantage of the Internet and the global economy. Second, they face certain everyday dilemmas of leading and managing corporate Goliaths.. And third, they have roles to play on the world political, economic, and social stage."

In the final chapter, Garten suggests that the three challenges "will be assessed by historians as having been too difficult for most CEOs to successfully handle all at once." This is especially true in larger organizations as their structures become "flatter", as delegation of authority becomes both wider and deeper, as "virtual" operations expand, and as strategic alliances (even with traditional competitors) proliferate. What intrigues me, frankly, is the relevance of the suggestion to owners/CEOs of small-to-midsize companies who, also, find many challenges "too difficult...to successfully handle all at once." Bennis and others have correctly identified the inadequacies of the authoritarian leadership style. In their book whose title is especially appropriate, O'Dell and Grayson suggest what could be accomplished in collaboration "if only we knew what we know." CEOs in years to come will have (indeed must have) quite different values, perspectives, and mindsets than those which today's CEOs possess. As indicated in what they say and do not say to Garten, many of today's CEOs agree.

I picked up this book at the airport and literally couldn't put it down throughout a six-hour flight to the West Coast. Not that this means anything to anyone else, but normally I couldn't even finish a single newspaper article on the plane because I've always fount it hard to concentrate, even in the slightly more comfortable seats of the business class. I assume the author is someone all of you who are decision-makers at corporations large and small and who have gone to business schools in the past 10 or 20 years will have heard of, if not actually studied. So I'll just say here that this book fully lives up to both the author's high reputation and its title. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the business world today, and not only for its elite either.

After reading this book, I have a deep understanding of what problems Ceos face in thier businesses. They need to tackle the challenges of the gobalization and internet. If they can handle it well, they can succeed. Moreover, the Ceos need to set up a true north so as to hold an organization together, customers would have much confidence to the organization.
In the book, it also points out one important thing is that, it is important for a company to have vision, but if it cannot executed, it is meaningless. It is very impressive, as the world is changing in every second, if you don't take any action immedately, you will fail.

This book was written prior to 9/11 and has a very growth oriented view that resulted from the expansion of the 1990s. It captures the minds of CEOs during the internet boom (a chapter dedicated to it) and what it meant to business at the time. It is not so relevant today.

The book is one of few that focus on corporate management but still place a good dose of social responsibility and content within the book.

After reading the reviews of the book, I expected much more. The e-book really just whets your appetite with generalities (e.g., about the internet or globalization) summarized from the full-text version. One could get far more from a typical on-line article in Fortune, Business Week, etc. The e-book version is 9 pages of about 14 font text, double-spaced. I guess that this would calculate into about two or three pages of a regular book. I would still like to read the full-text version but I would advise avoiding the e-book version.

The CEO has, for me at least, always been something of a celebrity. I have always wondered what life is like for a person who is responsible for 1000's of jobs and millions of dollars. When we see CEO's on the news, they are a lot like politicians - providing neutral answers to probing questions. This book does what the media fails to do, which is getting this business mavens to talk about real issues concerning their business and society in general. The responses are less formal, more relaxed and appear to be honest. Suprisingly, this book make CEO's appear to be servants of a complex circle of Customers, Employees and Shareholders. Which, I suppose, in the grander scheme of things that is what they are.

The only dissapointment of this book is that 85% of it is the author filling in his own interpretation and editorial comments between actual quotes from the CEO's. It would have been nice if the book was a series of interviews. This would have given readers more objective content and allowed us to decipher the language for ourselves. With only 15% of the reading being actual pull quotes from several CEO's, I would have to say that we only get a small glimpse of the CEO's mind.

But all in all, the author does a great job of posing the right questions to the right people. He certainly has a moral agenda that most of the consumer population would side with. It was nice to know that someone is willing to hold up the mirror of social responsibilty to the business world.