Customer Reviews

From the Sandbox to the Corner Office: Lessons Learned on the Journey to the Top

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... perhaps it may mean more for you if you have a strong enough desire to rise to the top. The one major impression I was left with was how diverse the ways were that these executives rose to the top. So no pattern (other than hard and well-leveraged work) but just recognizing that there is no pattern may be of value to you.

It's well-organized. The several lessons at the end of the presentation on each executive may be useful in themselves albeit many are general and almost none seem that notable. "When a door shuts, another door opens wide" : profound? At least encouraging, certainly preferrable to "When a door shuts, another will never open". But do these lessons resemble much of the advice of fortune tellers, i.e. almost always a fit but in the main not all that helpful.

Some of the experiences and lessons of these executives hardly seem different than what I have learned and from what I expect you have learned: the kind of learning that almost anyone who has had jobs will know. Others are more pertinent to those who lead, certainly you won't become a top executive if you're not a leader. However, there seems to be little in common among these leaders although than having had, from an early time it seems, a desire to lead and the corresponding willingness to make tough decisions and take risks.

Does it really help to know if an executive was spanked or not as a child? Might there not have been a better use of Tahmincioglu's time with these executives? Or will knowing that help you identify better with these leaders or decide how you want to raise your children? Hopefully not the latter.

Unfortunately, it seems top executives cannot reveal too much about their current issues so talking about their childhood, first jobs, and mentors may have been safe. Who hasn't had bad bosses? Is there anything in common about dealing with each of them?

So many different ways to lead, so many different ways to have become a leader, so many different job experiences every worker will have. There are some pleasant stories here but will they apply to you? The lesson may be not to look for any lessons other than those you work out with difficulty for yourself.

Eve has done a great job pulling together and organizing a wealth of material from a group of people not easy to get to. I know how hard this is myself - as a fellow contributor to The Times, including the BOSS column for the Sunday business section, and as the author of "Buddha or Bust" [...].

I say this all because I know how hard it is to get personal stories out of top-level executives who are trained, it sometimes seems, to talk in CorporateSpeak. Eve gets them to talk about everything from being spanked to bad bosses, which of course should be a no-no in CorporateLand.

A testament to her ability to capture not only these intimate details but also people's voices, it's hard to tell where the direct quotes end and her narration picks up, so seamless is her storytelling.

The book is organized by subject, so you can go to a section you might be interested in and bypass those you might not care about so much. I also like how she sums up each profile with that CEO's lessons learned in that category. If there is one change for the paperback edition, may I suggest somewhere before Chapter 1 she simply list all the CEOs in alphabetical order and the pages you will find them on.

There is a great mix of both men and women CEO's, and also a wide variety of businesses represented. So we get Pernille Spiers-Lopez of Ikea and Christie Hefner of [...] Enterprises (surprisingly she mostly attributes her success to her mother, only gives one paragraph to her father) and Danny Goldberg of Air America Radio and Terry Lundgren of Federated Department Stores.


I think the opening quote sums up the philosophy of these global business leaders and offers the best reason to buy - and memorize the lessons of -- this book. Says Aldous Huxley, "Experience is not what happens to you: It is what you do with what happens to you."

...on CEOS and how they came to be. This amazing collection of CEO life stories is a true treasure. Its a fun read and allows you to draw your own conclusion as to what drives a human being to strive for that leadership position. The intimate stories Eve manages to draw from these otherwise typically private leaders is invaluable and very entertaining. This book is great for many audiences...young parents, young adults on their way to their own version of success, and anyone, really, just for the individual anectodal stories that are quite interesting. I even gave a copy to my 16 year old. Would highly recommend.

"From the Sandbox" offers practical tips for the budding executive and for parents who want to establish a positive work ethic and nurturing environment for their kids. The anecdotes offered by the profiled executives are insightful and at times compelling.

This is a great book that takes you inside the real lives of the movers and shakers leading some of the largest organizations in US and the world. It is written in a great style that takes you through some of the most important events and life shaping events of the leaders that it chronicles. I especially enjoyed the chapter that details first jobs, from selling eggs to neighbors, to selling peanuts at Yankee stadium, and the lessons these leaders took away. The author does a great job of telling each story in an engaging way that lets the individual leader's voice come though, while at the same time distilling the lessons contained in a way that makes them useful to everyone. As a parent I would also recomend the book to any one interested in gaining more insight into family dynamics and there effects as one moves though organizations and leadership positions. The first chapter on parenting, which received a bunch of press when USA today wrote a piece on spanking that excerpts some of the CEOs detailed in the book had a bunch of other nuggets that I have found very useful in my home.