The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed [Hardcover]

Adam Bryant (Author)

Book Description

Release date: April 12, 2011

Dozens of top CEOs reveal their candid insights on the keys to effective leadership and the qualities that set high performers apart.

What does it take to reach the top in business and to inspire others? Adam Bryant of The New York Times decided to answer this and other questions by sitting down with more than seventy CEOs and asking them how they do their jobs and the most important lessons they learned as they rose through the ranks. Over the course of extraordinary interviews, they shared memorable stories and eye-opening insights.

The Corner Office draws together lessons from chief executives such as Steve Ballmer (Microsoft), Carol Bartz (Yahoo), Jeffrey Katzenberg (DreamWorks), and Alan Mulally (Ford), from which Bryant has crafted an original work that reveals the keys to success in the business world, including the five essential personality traits that all high performers exhibit—qualities that the CEOs themselves value most and that separate the rising stars from their colleagues. Bryant also demystifies the art of leadership and shows how executives at the top of their game get the most out of others.

Leadership is not a one-size-fits-all skill, and these CEOs offer different perspectives that will help anyone who seeks to be a more effective leader and employee. For aspiring executives—of all ages—The Corner Office offers a path to future success.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Bryant, deputy national editor of the New York Times and writer of the "Corner Office" feature in the paper's Sunday Business section, offers compelling advice for the aspiring executive. With interviews with more than 75 CEOs and other top executives at companies of all sizes, he compiles insights on such questions as what does it take to lead an organization? what are the keys to achieving the highest levels of success? Business luminaries like the CEO of Disney, the COO of Qwest Communications, the CEO of Continental Airlines, a vice chairman at Wal-Mart, and the founder of Zappos speak thoughtfully about team creation, keeping the mission on target, management, employee relationships, the importance of feedback, and the creation of an efficient corporate culture. The conversational format makes these valuable lessons easy to comprehend and digest, and readers are left with a new understanding of leadership—why it's important, how these experts have worked to attain it, and how they can do the same. (Apr.)
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Review

"Compelling advice for the aspiring executive.… The conversational format makes these valuable lessons easy to comprehend and digest, and readers are left with a new understanding of leadership--why it's important, how these experts have worked to attain it, and how they can do the same."—Publishers Weekly

"Adam Bryant’s The Corner Office is a great service – practical, well-written, chock full of insight and wisdom.  Reading this book is like joining a dinner table with some of the best leaders in America, listening in as a master conversationalist leads a spirited discussion you cannot forget.  A wonderful creation!"--Jim Collins, author of Good to Great and co-author of Built to Last

"The Corner Office is a modern management masterpiece. Adam Bryant distills and weaves together hundreds of gems from some of the most successful and intriguing executives on the planet. The result is one of the most delightful, readable, and useful business books I have read in years."--Robert Sutton, Professor of Management Science and Engineering, Stanford University, and bestselling author of Good Boss, Bad Boss

"This is the first and perhaps only book I would recommend to any aspiring or sitting leader for its wise and practical distillation of lessons for exemplary leadership. It is the best, most reliable GPS/road map, currently available, for successful leadership."--Warren Bennis, Distinguished Professor of Business, University of Southern California, and author of Still Surprised: A Memoir of a Life in Leadership

"The Corner Office is delightful, engaging, illuminating, wise, down-to-earth, and above all, fresh. Adam Bryant’s fascinating new ideas and memorable lessons will shake up the thinking of even the most jaded managers and inspire all leaders to find creative new approaches."--Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School professor and bestselling author of Confidence and SuperCorp

 

"Everybody needs a mentor or two. But this book gives you more than seventy of them -- all at the top of their games, all dispensing hard-won advice on business, management, and professional satisfaction. Nearly every page of The Corner Office has a nugget of wisdom that can improve your leadership and enrich your life."--Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive and A Whole New Mind

 

"The Corner Office is a terrific book – thoughtful, useful, and fun to read to boot. Its lessons will help every manager understand work differently – and quickly come at it with new ideas and practices."--Suzy Welch, coauthor of the bestseller Winning (with Jack Welch) and author of the bestseller 10-10-10: A Life-Transforming Idea

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Times Books; First Edition edition (April 12, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805093060
• ISBN-13: 978-0805093063
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #264,912 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Adam Bryant, the senior editor for features at The New York Times, has been a journalist for more than two decades. He was a business reporter for The New York Times during the 1990s, covering a variety of industries and topics, including airlines, aviation safety, executive compensation and corporate governance. He joined Newsweek in 1999 as a senior writer, and was promoted to business editor. After six years at Newsweek, he returned to the Times as an editor in the business section, where he oversaw coverage of the collapse of the Detroit auto industry, among other stories.

Adam was the lead editor for two prize-winning series: "Driven to Distraction," about the dangers of cellphone use behind the wheel, which won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2010, and "Toxic Waters," about water pollution, which won a number of awards.

In March 2009, Adam started the weekly "Corner Office" feature in the Times' Sunday Business section, and it quickly attracted a large and loyal audience for its insights about leadership and management from prominent leaders. For his book, The Corner Office, Adam studied the transcripts from more than 70 interviews, and looked for patterns, broader themes and lessons. He wove together their candid and wise insights into a book that offers timeless advice on how to succeed, manage and lead.

Adam lives in Westchester County, New York, with his wife and two daughters.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Dining on brain food at a "metaphysical table" with mostly CEOs April 20, 2011

By Robert Morris HALL OF FAMETOP 100 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

What we have in this volume is a "buffet" of "nuggets" from about 75 interviews of mostly CEOs that Adam Bryant conducted over a period of several years, interviews featured by The New York Times in its Sunday edition. Several of those interviewed are prominent but most were not familiar, at least to me, when I first read what they had to say about what they did as well as about how and why they did it.

Bryant is wise not to present one interview after another, in alpha or chronological order. Rather, he divides the material into three parts (Succeeding, Managing, and Leading) and cherry picks from the interviews whatever is most relevant to the given topic or insight. For example, consider this extended excerpt during which he shares what he learned about "passionate curiosity," the subject of the first chapter.

"The C.E.O.'s are not necessarily the smartest people in the room, but they are the best students -- the letters could just as easily stand for `chief education officer.'

"'You learn from everybody,' said Alan R. Mulally, the chief executive of the Ford Motor Company. `I've always just wanted to learn everything, to understand anybody that I was around -- why they thought what they did, why they did what they did, what worked for them, what didn't work.'

"Why `passionate curiosity'? The phrase is more than the sum of its parts, which individually fall short in capturing the quality that sets these C.E.O.'s apart. There are plenty of people who are passionate, but many of their passions are focused on just one area. There are a lot of curious people in the world, but they can also be wallflowers....

"But `passionate curiosity' -- a phrase used by Nell Minow, the co-founder of the Corporate Library -- better captures the infectious sense of fascination that some people have with everything around them.

"'Passionate curiosity,' Ms. Minow said, `is indispensable, no matter what the job is. You want somebody who is just alert and very awake and engaged with the world and wanting to know more.'

"Though chief executives are paid to have answers, their greatest contributions to their organizations may be asking the right questions. They recognize that they can't have the answer to everything, but they can push their company in new directions and marshal the collective energy of their employees by asking the right questions."

Bryant carefully selected chapter titles that, with few exceptions, specify or at least imply one of the core ingredients of great leadership at the C-level. They range from "Battle-Hardened Confidence" (Chapter 2) through "Bananas, Bells, and the Art of Running Meetings" (Chapter 9) to "Small Gestures, Big Payoffs" (Chapter 14). Those interviewed acknowledge mistakes made and what they learned from them, they explain how they interview and what they do (and do not) look for, and at least some of them indicate an endearing sense of vulnerability when citing the pressures and frustrations as well as loneliness when having to make tough decisions. Most of those interviewed seem to spend much more time in the trenches than in a corner office.

In the foreword, Bryant explains, "For this book, I was interested in pursuing a different story line about CEOs - their own personal stories, free of numbers, theories, jargon, charts, and with minimal discussions of their companies and industries." I presume to add that, in the case of the most prominent executives (e.g. Microsoft's Steven Ballmer, Cisco's John Chambers, Zappos' Tony Hsieh, Disney's Bob Iger, and Ford's Mulally), Bryant elicits remarkably frank comments that might not otherwise be shared if the corporate equivalent of "palace guards" had been involved.

Bryant notes that he was reminded of the first line of Tolstoy's novel, Anna Karenina, after interviewing dozens of executives: "'All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' Many of the CEOs I interviewed resembled one another in their approach. They listen, learn, assess what's working, what's not and why, and then make adjustments. They are quick studies and they also tend to be good teachers, because they understand the process of learning and can explain what they've learned to others. They seem eager to discuss their hard-earned insights, rather than holding on to them as if they were proprietary software."

To a significant extent, the same can be said of Bryant. He not only asks the right questions and elicits thoughtful responses; he also creates what (to me) resembles a mosaic of insights, revelations actually, that suggest all great leaders are alike but each has her or his own unique ways of deciding what is most important and, therefore, what must be done. Bryant characterizes his role as "dinner-party host, encouraging lively discussion and pointing out connections among the people gathered." He succeeds brilliantly but, in my opinion, he accomplishes much more than merely allowing those interviewed "to share their stories in their own voices." Those interviewed comprise a chorus of great voices and he is the skillful conductor of what now awaits those who read the book. Read more ›

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Not Exactly an Accurate Portrayal.... May 22, 2011

By Peter T. Szymonik

Format:Kindle Edition

Although the intent is there, the biggest problem with this book is that Mr. Bryant highlights a number of CEOs who can hardly be called role models for corporate success or ethical behavior.

Among the people Mr. Bryant interviewed for his book are CEOs of companies that are hardly success stories or to be admired on any level for their leadership qualities. CEOs whose personal comments on "leadership" and "success" do not mirror their actual real world business practices or corporate ethics in any way.

Many of these CEOs are the ones who can be blamed for the failings of corporate governance and leadership over the past decade. Ethical, strategic and operational lapses that were direct contributors and causes of this country's recent economic collapse. CEOs who should have known better and acted much better, but looked the other way, fought and ignored regulation, and personally profited from the collapse.

This book required much more research. Mr. Bryant should have included interviews with former top executives who worked for these CEOs to meaure and examine the very real differences between these CEO's self-glorifying and personal perspectives of themselves and their performance, against the reality of what they practice in the real world and have actually accomplished.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars What makes a person successful? Who is a good leader? April 18, 2011

By A&D

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

First, the author is a New York Times Sunday business columnist, and he knows what he is talking about. He compared different businesses and their CEOs. He wanted to find out why some people succeeded better than the others - was it the way they led or was there something else that made them differ from the others?
This book evaluates the persons based on their characters and personal attributes.
The author has interviewed and observed 75 CEOs and corporate executives, including companies like Aflac, Xerox, Continental Airlines, Cisco, Intercontinental Hotels, Timberland, and Yahoo.

You will learn a lot of how these examplary CEOs operate and evaluate their employees, and how their daily decisions affect the business and other employees.

But, it's not just the business decisions that are evaluated in the office but also the facial expressions and how you dress up...
A quote of the book:
"CEOs have learned firsthand what it takes to succeed and rise to the top of an organization. From the corner office, they can watch others attempt a similar climb, and notice the qualities that set people apart. As they evaluate talent, they learn to divine why one person is more likely to succeed than another. When they bring in talent from the outside, they watch as some new hires blend in better than others. Who succeeds? Who fails? Why? It's a feedback loop that expands with every additional person they manage, creating a kind of laboratory for studying the qualities that enable people to succeed."

The book is divided in 3 parts:
part 1: Succeeding
part 2: Managing
part 3: Leading

I ordered the kindle edition, and for some reason, my kindle version did not allow me to do any serches in this book.... I was a bit disappointed that I had not put any bookmarks while I read it because afterwards it was hard to find some topics.

I found it interesting to read how the CEOs built teams and how they value different chracteristics. Read more ›

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Author took time to synthesize the stories he collected May 24, 2011

By D. C. Toedt

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

"The Corner Office" draws on the CEO interviews that Bryant has been doing for two-plus years for a weekly NY Times column of the same title. But the book is NOT just a reprint of his columns. Instead, Bryant sifts, sorts, and summarizes key takeaways of what his CEO subjects have variously told him. In each of the book's three major parts, Bryant sets out the career-changing practices and attitudes he has observed, illustrating them with real-life stories, quotable quotes, and "what seems to have worked for me" pointers from his subjects. Great reading for any manager, whether or not she aspires to the corner office.