Nightly Business Report Presents Lasting Leadership: What You Can Learn From The Top 25 Business People Of Our Times - Hardcover

Pandya, Mukul; Shell, Robbie; Warner, Susan; Junnarkar, Sandeep; Brown, Jeffrey

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9780131531185: Nightly Business Report Presents Lasting Leadership: What You Can Learn From The Top 25 Business People Of Our Times

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0131531182 ISBN 13: 9780131531185

Publisher: Wharton School Pub, 2004

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Paths to greatness: Actionable lessons from today's most remarkable business leaders
Incisive profiles from Knowledge@Wharton and Nightly Business Report
Andy Grove, Mary Kay Ash, Lou Gerstner, Richard Branson, Herb Kelleher, Charles Schwab... and 19 more

In this book, two of the world's most respected sources of business insight come together to select and profile the 25 most influential businesspeople of the past quarter century. These incisive profiles teach specific lessons you can use to discover, refine, and nurture your own leadership style... achieve breakthrough results... and accelerate your career progress.

The team: Nightly Business Report, the United States' #1 daily TV business news program, and Knowledge@Wharton, The Wharton School's online journal of research and business analysis. Together, they offer powerful new insights into familiar faces--and reveal the passion and brilliance that allowed less-well-known leaders to achieve the extraordinary.

From corporate culture to brand management, risk-taking to pricing, this book's insights won't just help you: they'll inspire you.

What outstanding leaders do, and how they do it

Actionable insights for achieving your own form of greatness

Building corporate culture that can withstand anything

What you can learn from Southwest's Herb Kelleher and J&J's James Burke

Key attributes of lasting leadership

Giving voice to customers, giving voice to truth

Getting smarter, faster

Case studies in building organizations that learn--and act

Reinventing your business: when it's time, how to do it

Lessons from the master: Steve Jobs

Discovering underserved markets--and serving them profitably

Mohammed Yunus: Profiting from entrepreneurship in the world's poorest communities

The greatest business leaders of our generation

How they achieved the impossible

What you can learn from them

How to use those lessons to supercharge your career

25 compelling profiles from two of the world's leading sources of business insight:

Nightly Business Report and The Wharton School's Knowledge@Wharton

25 extraordinary leaders, 25 incisive profiles:

Andy Grove, Intel

Bill Gates, Microsoft

John Bogle, The Vanguard Group

Steve Jobs, Apple & Pixar

Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway

Herb Kelleher, Southwest Airlines

Sam Walton, Wal-Mart

Jack Welch, GE

Jeff Bezos, Amazon

Mary Kay Ash, Mary Kay

Michael Dell, Dell

Peter F. Drucker

Alan Greenspan

Oprah Winfrey, Harpo, Inc.

George Soros, Soros Fund Management

James Burke, Johnson & Johnson

Lee Iacocca, Chrysler

Peter Lynch, Fidelity Investments

Frederick Smith, FedEx

Mohammed Yunus, Grameen Bank

Ted Turner, Turner Broadcasting

Lou Gerstner, IBM & RJR Nabisco

Charles Schwab, Charles Schwab

Richard Branson, Virgin

William George, Medtronic

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About the Author:

Nightly Business Report Presents Lasting Leadership: What You Can Learn from the Top 25 Business People of Our TimesAbout the Authors

Mukul Pandya is editor and director of Knowledge@Wharton, a web-based journal of research and business analysis published by The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

A winner of four awards for investigative journalism, Mr. Pandya has more than twenty years of experience as a writer and editor. His articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Economist, Time Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and many other publications. He coauthored Knowledge@Wharton on Building Corporate Value.

Mr. Pandya, who has an M.A. in economics from the University of Bombay, lives in Ewing, NJ, with his wife and daughter.

Robbie Shell, the managing editor of Knowledge@Wharton, has worked as a business reporter and editor for national news services, newspapers, and magazines throughout her career. She has covered both the White House and U.S. Supreme Court and taught journalism at the University of Virginia. Her freelance work most recently appeared in The Wall Street Journal. A graduate of Princeton University, she lives in Wynnewood, PA, with her husband and two sons.

Introduction

Introduction

In June 2000, John Bogle, founder and former CEO of the Vanguard Group, spoke about leadership at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. As an avid group of executives listened to the man who popularized the principle of index-based investing—and in the process built the Vanguard Group into a firm managing more than $550 billion in assets—Bogle ended his speech quoting James Norris, a Vanguard manager, who wrote: "While it is revealing to consider...what constitutes a leader, your search for understanding, for some kind of leadership formula, is apt to end in frustration. It is like studying Michelangelo or Shakespeare: You can imitate, emulate, and simulate, but there is simply no connect-the-dots formula to Michelangelo's David or Shakespeare's Hamlet. I suppose, when all is said and done, it really comes down to this: People are leaders because they choose to lead."

The heart of leadership is as simple as that: It is a matter of choice and determination. It is equally true, however, that no two leaders are exactly alike. Gandhi and Churchill rallied millions behind them, but not quite in the same way or for the same reasons. In the business world, John Bogle's leadership of Vanguard might have something in common with the way Warren Buffett runs Berkshire Hathaway, but the two also have big differences—although both are involved, broadly, in the "investment" business. Andrew Grove and Bill Gates are chairmen of high-tech companies with commanding positions in their respective markets—but while Gates grew up as the privileged son of a wealthy attorney, Grove spent his early years enduring the rigors of Stalinist Hungary. These vastly different backgrounds are reflected in their approaches to leadership.

If this is true, then people who choose and are determined to become influential business leaders can benefit from observing other leaders and using their observations to discover and nurture their own leadership style. The purpose of studying other business leaders is not so much to imitate their qualities as to discover which attributes resonate with one's own and, thus, can be cultivated to further enhance one's leadership skills and capabilities. Leaders are made, not born. Discovering the attributes of lasting leadership can help people increase their impact in their own spheres. Someone who does this might not become another Jack Welch or Mary Kay Ash, but he or she might become a better leader than would otherwise be possible in the absence of this knowledge.

Our book, Lasting Leadership: What You Can Learn from the Top 25 Business People of Our Times, is based on that premise. It is the result of collaboration between Nightly Business Report (NBR), the most-watched daily business program on U.S. television, and Knowledge@Wharton (http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu), the online research and business analysis journal of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. To celebrate NBR's 25th anniversary in January 2004, Wharton and NBR worked together to identify the 25 most influential business leaders of the past 25 years. NBR's viewers nominated more than 700 business people from around the world, and a panel of six Wharton judges selected the Top 25.

The winners are, in alphabetical order, Mary Kay Ash, founder of Mary Kay Inc.; Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com; John Bogle, founder of The Vanguard Group; Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin Group; Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway; James Burke, former CEO of Johnson & Johnson; Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Inc.; Peter Drucker, the educator and author; William Gates, chairman of Microsoft; William George, former CEO of Medtronic; Louis Gerstner, former CEO of IBM; Alan Greenspan, chairman, U.S. Federal Reserve; Andrew Grove, chairman of Intel; Lee Iacocca, former CEO of Chrysler; Steven Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer; Herbert Kelleher, chairman of Southwest Airlines; Peter Lynch, former manager of Fidelity's Magellan Fund; Charles Schwab, founder, CEO and chairman of The Charles Schwab Corp.; Frederick Smith, CEO of Federal Express; George Soros, founder and chairman of The Open Society Institute; Ted Turner, founder of CNN; Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart; Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric; Oprah Winfrey, chairman of the Harpo group of companies; and Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank.

To arrive at this list from among hundreds of nominees, the Wharton panel searched for business leaders who created new and profitable ideas. They looked for people who had affected political, civic, or social change in the business/economic world; created new business opportunities or more fully exploited existing ones; caused or influenced dramatic change in a company or industry; or inspired and transformed others. The judges included Michael Useem, director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management; Peter Cappelli, director of the Center for Human Resources; Raffi Amit, director of the Goergen Entrepreneurial Research Program; Barbara Kahn, vice dean of the Wharton undergraduate division; Robert E. Mittelstaedt, Jr., former vice dean and director of the Aresty Institute of Executive Education (now dean of the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University); and Mukul Pandya, editor and director of Knowledge@Wharton.

Andy Grove: Best of the Best

NBR asked the Wharton judges to pick the most influential leader among these 25. That honor went to Intel's Andy Grove. To understand why, consider this: When Grove got his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1963, he was a corporate recruiter's dream candidate. He had a number of job options, perhaps the best of which was with Bell Labs, at the time the Mecca of research in solid-state physics. But Grove made a different choice. Rather than head for Bell Labs, he joined Fairchild Semiconductor, a West Coast upstart, where he worked under the legendary Gordon Moore, who led the company's research operation. That was an early example of out-of-the-box thinking from Grove, who five years later left Fairchild with Moore and others to co-found Intel.

After he succeeded Moore as Intel's CEO in 1987, Grove took other steps that shunned conventional logic—perhaps most visibly during the "Intel Inside" campaign of the 1990s. Back then, the most recognized brands in the computer industry were hardware makers, such as IBM or software firms like Microsoft. Intel, though it supplied more than 80% of the microprocessors to the world's computers, was hardly known outside a small band of industry insiders. Determined to change that narrow perception, Grove led Intel into an aggressive branding campaign that made the company a household name by the end of the decade. Today, as its products play an increasingly critical role in stitching together a globally networked economy, Intel has emerged as one of the world's top technology companies, with 2003 revenues of more than $30 billion.

Grove's leadership of Intel—marked as it has been by unconventional thinking, imagination, and integrity—was instrumental in his being named the most influential business leader of the past 25 years. "My life has been intertwined with Intel," Grove told NBR co-anchor Susie Gharib. "My proudest accomplishment has been to contribute to the creation of a company that has helped put a billion PCs into people's hands."

Learning from Leaders

In addition to identifying these individuals as influential leaders, the Wharton judges discussed aspects of their character that contributed to their success. In Grove's case, for example, his openness to unconventional ideas was a critical factor. In his or her way, however, each of these leaders has traits from which others could learn.

Consider Warren Buffett, whom Michael Useem describes as "a man for all seasons." According to Useem, not only is Buffett "an investor extraordinaire" who has delivered enormous returns to investors in Berkshire Hathaway, but he was also highly successful as the hands-on CEO of Salomon Brothers, helping restore confidence in the Wall Street firm when it faced a severe management crisis. These days, "Buffett has become the conscience of the Street, offering great wisdom on contentious topics like expensing stock options," Useem says. In other words, in addition to his genius at spotting good investment opportunities, Buffett's influence derives from his moral stature and integrity. In the aftermath of accounting and governance scandals that have rocked U.S. companies in the past few years, it is difficult to overemphasize the importance of ethics as a factor in leadership.

Bogle, like Buffett, owes his influence to having delivered great value to investors—though his approach was strikingly different. The former CEO of the Vanguard Group has long argued that "owning the entire stock market at very low cost is the ultimate investment strategy." This belief led him to launch the Vanguard Group in 1975. Bogle was a pioneer in introducing and helping popularize index funds—which kept fees extremely low for investors. Says Peter Cappelli: "One of the reasons why Bogle is on this list is because of the enormous impact he had on the average person."

Sam Walton's approach to Wal-Mart's customers was similar, according to Robert E. Mittelstaedt, Jr. The goal of making a wide range of products available to average people at the lowest possible price enabled him to take the retail company from a single store to a megacorp that is now ranked No. 1 on the Fortune 500. "Walton's legacy is that a single person can make a huge difference in an industry," says Mittelstaedt. "It doesn't happen overnight, esp...

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