Maximum Leadership

Book excerpt: Business fads come and go, but the importance of corporate leadership as a determining factor for success has never been doubted. But exactly what is corporate leadership? Is it a CEO with a strong personality, one with strong management skills, one who has a combination of these traits--or something else entirely? What factors, in other words, make a powerfully effective corporate leader? In this era of increasingly fierce global competition few questions spark as much controversy and debate. Thus, in the summer of 1994, the authors of this book began traveling across North America, Europe, and Asia to interview the heads of more than 160 major multinational corporations, in industries as diverse as entertainment, banking, diamond mining, and semiconductors. Their goal was the explore the role of the CEO--to discover how the men and women at the pinnacle of some of the world's most prominent companies fulfill their role as leaders. They came away not with abstract theories about management but with real stories about how CEOs actually spend their days, whom they see, where they go, which decisions they make, which they don't, and why. In the process, the authors uncovered new and provocative evidence that there exist five distinct styles of leadership. In Maximum Leadership they illustrate those styles--or "approaches," as they call them--with vivid examples and the candid voices of CEOs at companies such as Coca-Cola, Gillette, Nintendo, Hewlett-Packard, Goldman Sachs, and Nestle. These executives and dozens of others tell fascinating, revealing, often funny and sometimes poignant stories about the challenges they face and how they have met them. Some are "human assets" leaders, running their companies by scrupulously managing hundreds of individuals and the relationships between them. Others are "box" leaders, who define their role as building the fortress of rules, regulations, and corporate culture that will guarantee their companies success. There are also strategic leaders, expertise champions, and change agents, each with their own unique qualities, priorities, and styles of managing, both day-to-day and over the long term. With these five approaches and the authors' cogent analyses of them, Maximum Leadership introduces a new vocabulary for understanding how companies are run to achieve their greatest potential and offers important insights for those inside the corporate office--and everyone whose career is impacted by what happens there.