The Mind of the Ceo - Hardcover

Garten, Jeffrey

3.39

33 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0713994797 ISBN 13: 9780713994797

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2001

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Over the last decade the world has embraced free market forces with unprecedented zeal. This has led to more power being accrued in the hands of big corporations. Who are the CEOs who run these corporate goliaths? What are their strategies? Whatare their thoughts about the roles of their firms in global society? To find answers to these questions, Garten interviewed thirty of the most powerful global business leaders - from Sir John Browne of BP-Amoco to Michael Dell of Dell Computers, from Martin Sorrell of WPP to Hiroshi Okuda of Toyota. He draws together their thoughts to create a picture of the global economy in the decade to come, and the role corporations will play in it.

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Review:

Yale Management School dean and BusinessWeek columnist Jeffrey Garten has written a provocative if perhaps mistitled book. Billed as a "journey into the innermost thoughts of corporate titans", The Mind of the CEO is really about Garten's own thoughts. He makes no pretense at being objective, admitting: "I want to talk about the awesome challenges CEOs face as seen through what they said to me and as filtered through my own experiences and my own thoughts."

Garten uses his interviews with forty household names--including Intel's Andy Grove, GE's Jack Welch, PepsiCo's Roger Enrico, and AOL's Steven Case--to articulate his own questions and strategies for CEOs to thrive during the "third industrial revolution." He interprets these interviews through the lens of his tenures on Wall Street, at Yale, and as President Clinton's Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade. Among the challenges he analyzes: what CEOs are doing (or must do) to win the Internet wars and meet the challenges of going global; why CEOs must emphasise the "true north" of consistent values; and how a shareholder is different from a stakeholder. With great clarity, he details the demise of several CEOs who resigned under pressure, including Aetna's Richard Huber and Xerox's Richard Thoman, and suggests that "a vision without execution is a hallucination".

Yet Garten's core concern--and one where he is most passionate--is how to expand the leadership role of CEOs on the world stage. He urges leaders to curb their ethnocentrism and to take more responsibility for creating a world environment in which everyone can prosper. By framing this issue of leaders as world citizens, Garten raises smart and searching questions for a wired world economy. --Barbara Mackoff

Synopsis:

"The Mind of the CEO" describes and analyzes how over 20 major CEOs see global markets over the next decade, and how they plan to factor the outlooks into concrete business strategies. The author explores how these leaders see such future imponderables as the changing structure of the USA as it heads for a more technological, information-intensive and globalized economy; a united Europe with a single currency; the evolution of a currently crippled Japan; the future of emerging markets like China, Russia and Brazil; and the impact of the digital revolution. The importance of these questions is enhanced by the increasingly prominent role that global business leaders play in all societies, as market power dwarfs the ability of government to shape our lives.

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