The Mind of the CEO

The Mind of the CEO

Jeffrey E. GartenPenguin Business BooksISBN 046502615X£20.00Keywords:Top management, Executives, Corporate culture

This book claims to be a “journey into the innermost thoughts of corporate titans”, but, as ever, tells you more about the mind of the authorGarten makes no claims to objectivity, admitting that “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”. He then goes on to use interviews with 40 household names – including Intel’s Andy Grove, GE’s Jack Welch, PepsiCo’s Roger Enrico, and AOL’s Steve Case – to ask questions of CEOs about thriving during the “third Industrial Revolution”. He asks what CEOs are doing or must do to win the Internet wars and meet the challenges of global economies, why CEOs must emphasize the “true north” of consistent values, and how a shareholder is different from a stakeholder. He, interestingly, charts 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 certainly the one he raises most passionately – relates to CEOs operating on the world stage. He seems to think that the CEOs of global companies are comparable to government leaders and must take on responsibilities for creating a world environment in which everyone can prosper. Of course, it is possible to argue that this is the shared responsibility of us all – but Garten does not offer sufficient evidence and analysis to back up his passion.

The book is, of course, interesting. Interviews with the people involved are almost certain to be so. However, it is best viewed as a collection of such interviews, rather than as a unifying theory.