Mother Teresa, CEO: Unexpected Principles for Practical Leadership (Bk Business) [Hardcover]

Ruma Bose (Author), Lou Faust (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 5, 2011 | Series: Bk Business

What organization, founded in 1948 by a passionate entrepreneur and twelve loyal team members, grew to become one of the largest enterprises in the world? Today it has operations in over 100 countries, includes over 1 million team members, has raised and deployed billions of dollars in capital, and is one of the most recognized brands in history.

Is it Hewlett-Packard? Coca-Cola? Disney?

No, it is the Missionaries of Charity. And Mother Teresa was its leader.

How did this nun with no formal business training create a global brand, become a powerful fund-raising and public relations magnet, and lead a worldwide organization through every phase of growth over the course of forty-seven years? What were her secrets?

When we shift our lens and view Mother Teresa from a leadership perspective, a wonderful success story emerges, one filled with inspiration, life lessons, and impact.

Ruma Bose spent time in Calcutta working as a volunteer with Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity in 1992. Over time, she discovered that Mother Teresa’s success resulted from the careful application of eight simple and unexpected principles.

Through the pages of this book you will have the unique opportunity to learn these principles, share Bose’s experience with Mother Teresa, and discover how to apply Mother Teresa’s principles whether on a single project, throughout an organization, or in your life.

Modern, well-timed, and humane, Mother Teresa, CEO helps you discover how you don’t have to be a saint to be a great leader!
 

Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for Mother Teresa, CEO

“I have always regarded Mother Teresa as one of my role models because she understood and demonstrated through her own being that real leadership comes from the soul. This exploration of Mother Teresa’s deep well of compassion, dignity, empathy, and love is a profound meditation on what it means to be a real leader.”
—Deepak Chopra, author of The Soul of Leadership

“Ruma Bose’s and Lou Faust’s perspective on the iconic Mother Teresa’s unique leadership skills is nothing short of a revelation. Having started my career in the social services world, I found that some of the best business managers hail from that world, with Mother Teresa certainly a leading example. I found myself nodding and “uh-huhing” as I recognized the simple but powerful lessons that Mother Teresa’s eight principles can teach us all. Simply extraordinary.”
—Jim McCann, founder and CEO, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM and Celebrations.com

“Entrepreneurship isn’t about starting a business; it’s about creating a state of mind. Bose and Faust do a tremendous job of demonstrating Mother Teresa’s entrepreneurial mind-set as she grew the Missionaries of Charity around the world. The eight leadership principles outlined in their book provide both inspiration and guidance to anyone passionate about and committed to building a global organization.”
—Leonard A. Schlesinger, President, Babson College, and former Vice Chairman and Chief Operating Officer, Limited Brands

“This book is a wonderful addition to Mother Teresa’s legacy. A fantastic journey that gave me insight into simple principles that can be profitably applied to any organization. Bose and Faust reveal a previously unrecognized facet of this extraordinary woman’s life, one that provides lessons any leader can benefit from. Profound, engaging, and packed with insight. I couldn’t recommend it more highly.”
—Gloria Nelund, cofounder, Chair, and CEO, TriLinc Global, and former Head, Private Wealth Management Division for North America, Deutsche Bank

About the Author

Ruma Bose is president and co-CEO of Sprayology, a homeopathic and vitamin wellness company. She is actively engaged in philanthropy and sits on a number of nonprofit boards. She is originally from Montreal but resides in New York City.

Lou Faust is a businessman and advisor with thirty years of corporate experience, including ten years on Wall Street with Salomon Brothers, where he was a managing director and head of global operations. He is the managing partner and founder of Edge Capital Partners, which provides strategic advice to emerging growth companies. He lives in Broomfield, Colorado.
 

Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers (July 5, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1605099511
• ISBN-13: 978-1605099514
• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 0.6 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #246,645 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ruma Bose is a serial entrepreneur, investor, philanthropist, and author. In 1992/1993, Ruma spent time in Calcutta working with Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity.

Ruma is currently president and co-CEO of Sprayology, an innovative wellness company that sells vitamin and homeopathic oral sprays. Previously, Ruma worked as a venture capitalist, advisor, and executive at many early-stage companies in the consumer industry. She cofounded a national floor-finishing company in the janitorial services industry. She then moved to the beauty industry, where she was president of a leading boutique cosmetics firm in New York City and advised several luxury brands as a managing director at Sage Beauty Group.

Ruma currently serves on the boards of SecretBuilders, an online children's edutainment firm, and Brooklyn Equities, a fashion portfolio company. She is also an active philanthropist, serving on the boards of the Aquaya Institute, SEED NY, and Kopernik. She enjoys traveling, boxing and discovering the world, preferably with her nephew Simon by her side.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book: simple, effective and down-to-earth June 27, 2011

By R. Wu

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This is a great book to be read more than once. A casual reader might feel somehow "tell me something I do not know", but this is precisely the point. If these simple principles can enable Mother Teresa to build a global organization, it sure will help average Joe. Not everyone is a manager or a wanna-be entrepreneur. But everyone is a leader; you lead yourself. This book is very simple but may takes time to understand. For example, "Joy of Discipline". How do you feel joy out of discipline? Well, read this book.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Another Side of an Almost Saint June 21, 2011

By ruthjoec

Format:Hardcover

There is a part of us that realizes that those religious leaders who have built large orders with multiple institutions must have some sort of management skills, yet is is generally their faith and their good works, not their leadership for which we remember the saints. However Ruma Bose and Lou Faust have analyzed Mother Theresa as a leader and tried to determine why she was successful and how that success could be imitated and transferred to business enterprises.

The book is divided into chapters by the principals described. They are:
Dream it Simple, Say it Strong
Dealing with the Devil to get to the Angels
Wait! Then pick your moment
Embrace the power of doubt
Discover the joy of discipline
Communicate in a language people understand
Pay attention to the janitor
Use the power of silence
The chapters begin with a story either describing an encounter the author had with Mother Theresa or telling a story about her life. The story is then tied into the principal and then the author tells how that principal was used in a business situation.

I enjoyed the stories about Mother Theresa and her sisters. As far as the management end of it, well, I'm not a manager, so I have a hard time saying whether the advice is good or not. The book was interesting reading. The only problem I had was that I thought the business examples were just too vague. I know it is hard in a book like this to walk the line between giving advice in a manner that it seems only good for widget making or whatever other particular business you are using as an example, and giving advice so general that it is hard to figure how to employ it in a specific situation. There were at least a couple of occasions on which I thought to myself that it would be nice to have had a better idea of what the problem was and how the principal in question was used to solve it. Grade: B

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Mother Teresa's message is timeless September 10, 2011

By CabriniFan

Format:Hardcover

As a not-so-young entrepeneur and practicing Catholic I had to pick up this book! Ruma Bose & Lou Faust collaborate in an inspiring book. They present Mother Teresa as a powerful leader and servant. One could say this is a contradiction, but after reading this book you understand that there is no true leadership without service, and no true service without leadership. Bose & Faust manage to verbalize the work of the Holy Spirit that moved Mother Teresa in the contemporary language of today's leaders thus demonstrating one of Mother Teresa's principles: COMMUNICATE IN A LANGUAGE PEOPLE UNDERSTAND. This proves that both authors have internalized the spirit of Mother Teresa, and perhaps that is the biggest impact of this book, that in writing it the authors demonstrate that Mother Teresa's -unexpected principles for practical leaders- ARE achievable. Definetively not another "leadership book", this book is daring and in my opnion a classic. Why? Because Mother Teresa's message is timeless. Thank you Ruma Bose for bringing Mother Teresa to those of us who never had the honor of meeting her.