Straight from the CEO is a major event, because the world rarely hears directly from the great contemporary business leaders—the chief movers and shapers of major corporations around the globe. Working closely with the Price Waterhouse management team, a wide variety of chief executives who are successfully managing today's rapid pace of economic change present their ideas about leading and motivating people, unleashing innovation and creativity, and learning from customers to revitalize their businesses.

Among the many CEOs represented in the book are the heads of British Airways, Compaq Computer, Monsanto, Royal Dutch/Shell, Enron, Chase Manhattan Bank, and Warner-Lambert. The scope is worldwide: from Bangkok to Oshkosh, from Dusseldorf to Dallas.

No ivory tower theorizing, no speeches, no "consultant speak," these are the practical insights of leaders who every day must find ways to test and validate new ideas, implement change to improve the bottom line, and ultimately focus on the core ideas that will truly reshape their corporations.

Straight from the CEO is an important tool for managers at every level, focusing on such issues as creating loyalty to customers, organizing globally, fostering individual employee motivation, and leveraging corporate values to enhance performance. These are the pressing issues that face every manager who strives to sort out important contributions from impractical ideas, the gold from the dross, and then take action that gets results. As intellectually stimulating as it is practical, Straight from the CEO is an invaluable report from the executive trenches.

• Royal Dutch/Shell's Cor Herkströter, mastermind of the most ambitious makeover among the world's energy behemoths, rewrites the book on Shell's relationships with shareholders, operating units, and managers.
• British Airways' Sir Colin Marshall, the marketing genius who powered the carrier's celebrated turnaround, shows how a management style shaped by early personal experiences taught him the importance of customers, customer service, and customization.
• Chase Manhattan's Walter Shipley, architect of one of the largest mergers ever seen in the financial sector, believes that many mergers fail to yield their promise because one partner insists on dominating the other. Shipley explains how and why his philosophy of the integrative merger, which respects the abilities of both sides and is free of power struggles, has led to several merger successes.
• Monsanto's Robert B. Shapiro has raised the hurdle bar on growth and profitability goals, although the company is at the peak of its form. He explains how the biotech giant is being transformed by programs that drive both growth and profits via novel incentives that are deeply embedded in a decentralized organization.
• Young & Rubicam's Peter Georgescu looks beyond the conventional wisdom about the present economic boom to reveal some grim truths: (1) increases in corporate profit derived from cutting fat are exhausted; (2) many thousands of factories are operating far below full capacity; (3) the no-brainer marketing ploys of the past are useless. The only way to sustain growth of sales and profits, he maintains, is through better brand-building that reflects a new and deeper relationship between brands and customers.
• British Aerospace's Sir Richard Evans developed one of Britain's biggest and boldest corporate change management programs‹an initiative that galvanized an internally divided, underperforming company and made it into a stock market favorite.
• Compaq Computer's Eckhard Pfeiffer has transformed himself from a successful turnaround artist into a hard-driving champion of continuous corporate renewal. Here, he demonstrates how continuous renewal has boosted his firm's competitive preparedness, its competencies, and its profits.

Soundview Executive Summaries - books selected in 1998

Good book, look for hardback
Excellent book with many articles and opinions from top CEOs. These are some of the best business books out there, letting you see how the people who run these companies think. I don't know if the paperback has it or not, and honestly I would imagine given what happened it probably has been removed, but in the hardback version, the late Kenneth Lay, CEO of Enron for the majority of years (except for 4 months when Jeff Skilling took over), writes his own little 8 page article on it. I don't know if the paperback has it or not, but I do know any hardback copy from 1998 would.

Straight from the CEO is an important tool for managers at every level, focusing on such issues as creating loyalty to customers, organizing globally, fostering individual employee motivation, and leveraging corporate values to enhance performance. These are the pressing issues that face every manager who strives to sort out valuable contributions from impractical ideas, the gold from the dross, and then take action that gets results. As intellectually stimulating as it is practical, Straight from the CEO is an invaluable report from the executive trenches.

By necessity brief, the many pieces (I hesitate to call them chapters or even articles) lack depth, assume much and as a result are quite unstatisfying; but they do leave the reader hungry for more!

William Dauphinais is Vice Chairman, Human Capital for PricewaterhouseCoopers. He co-authored with Colin Price two previous books, The Paradox Principles and Better Change. He has 25 years of business experience covering a broad range of organizational change, business reengineering, financial planning, and information technology issues. He received both his undergraduate degree and his MBA from the University of Michigan. Colin Price was previously a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, where he oversaw a Strategic Change Consulting, a practice of 3,000 consultants working with global clients in managing large-scale corporate transformations. He has a BA in Economics and graduate degrees in Organizational Psychology. Married with one child, he lives outside London.

Reviewed by Azlan Adnan. Formerly Business Development Manager with KPMG, Azlan Adnan is currently Managing Partner of Azlan & Koh Knowledge and Professional Management Group, an education and management consulting practice based in Kota Kinabalu. He holds a Master's degree in International Business and Management from the Westminster Business School, London.