دانلود کتاب تعالی مدیر عامل

At the annual Leadership Forum hosted by McKinsey & Company in the picturesque waterfront town of St. Michaels, Maryland, thirty soon-to-be CEOs were gathered in the conference room. On this rainy fall evening, the retreat’s first day, everyone snapped to attention as the moderator, Vik (one of your coauthors), posed an intriguing question: “What does a CEO really do?” Without pause, the first guest speaker, a chief executive of one of the world’s largest technology companies, responded, “I can say with con fidence that the role of the CEO boils down to…” He then expanded on each of three items with conviction and clarity. At the end of the night, everyone left feeling a mysterious veil had been lifted. That is, until the following morning’s speaker, the leader of a multinational financial services company, answered Vik’s same question. The guest articulated what she viewed as the three primary roles for a CEO, punctuating each with potent, reinforcing examples. They were an altogether different set than offered by the first night’s speaker. That evening, the third and final CEO speaker, leader of one of the world’s most prestigious academic medical centers, presented—you guessed it—yet another categorically different list of the three “most important” aspects of the CEO role. The next morning Scott and Carolyn (your two other coauthors) brought the retreat to a close, doing their best to crisply summarize the key takeaways. On the subsequent hour and a half drive to the nearest major airport, the three of us discussed how starkly different each guest speaker’s list had been. We guessed that if we’d had a fourth speaker, we’d have yet another take on the CEO role. We all agreed that each piece of advice raised by our speakers was important and helpful, but in aggregate, the information felt disjointed. It was unsettling. As CEO counselors, we know that how a person performs in the CEO role matters. CEOs who rank in the top 20 percent of financial performance generate, on average, 2.8 times more total return to shareholders (TRS) during each year of their tenure than do average performers. More concretely, if you invest $1,000 in a Standard and Poor’s (S&P) 500 index fund and over ten years your investment grows at historical averages, your investment will make you just under $1,600. If you invest in the companies led by the top quintile highest performing CEOs, you’ll gain more than $10,000. That’s a big difference. What’s more, the extent to which a CEO is a signi ficant predictor of a company’s performance has more than doubled since the mid-twentieth century. This “CEO effect” will undoubtedly become even more important in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world, one in which stakeholder capitalism is on the rise—calling leaders to move far beyond Milton Friedman’s notion that companies exist solely to create pro fits for shareholders. In fact, the actions of today’s companies will likely have more impact on societal issues such as the environment, health care, wealth inequality, and human rights than those of governments and charitable organizations. By the time we got to the airport the three of us decided to work together to de finitively answer the question: “What does a CEO really do?” That knowledge in itself would be extremely valuable. But we wanted to go beyond that, to find out how the best CEOs work differently from the rest and why. This would mean getting deep inside the minds of those who truly excel in the role. Such an effort, we felt, would be welcomed by CEOs and their many stakeholders—boards, investors, employees, regulators, customers, suppliers, and communities. After all, in the past two decades, 30 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs have lasted less than three years, with two out of five new CEOs failing in their first eighteen months on the job. These leaders could certainly have bene fited from a primer on what the role entails and that includes lessons gleaned from the best.