Saltar la navegación
Authentic Leadership
Book

Authentic Leadership

Rediscovering the Secrets to Creating Lasting Value

Jossey-Bass, 2003 más...


Editorial Rating

7

Recommendation

Few companies got more marketing mileage out of their culture than Medtronic. Its former CEO, author Bill George, is proud of his company’s squeaky clean corporate record. Despite all the clichés he may muster, despite his occasional preachiness, perhaps no CEO has written a more lucid or insightful series of reflections on the challenge of managing a corporation in twentieth century America. Read this book and you will learn some obvious lessons and some new ones: that leaders should be honest, that they will be tempted to cut corners in pursuit of short term profits but really ought to resist that temptation, that devotion to customers is at least as important as devotion to shareholders (provided you make your numbers every quarter) and that managers at Enron and WorldCom did the wrong thing, but we can learn a lesson from them. getAbstract.com acknowledges that Bill George may be as close as American executive ranks have come to producing a moral philosopher.

Take-Aways

  • Enron and WorldCom did the world a favor by focusing attention on the problems of capitalism so that people could start fixing them.
  • There’s plenty of blame to go around: shareholders, the press and the general public all share responsibility for the corporate scandals.
  • If we reward people only for increasing shareholder value, we can’t expect them to be honest, too.

About the Author

Bill George is the former chairman and CEO of Medtronic, a board member of Goldman Sachs, Target and Novartis, and Executive-in-Residence at Yale University. He was recognized as "Executive of the Year" by the Academy of Management and "Director of the Year" by the National Association of Corporate Directors. BusinessWeek cited him among its "Top 25 Managers."


Comment on this summary or Comenzar discusión

More on this topic

By the same author

Learners who read this summary also read