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Straight from the CEO: The World's Top Business Leaders Reveal Ideas That Every Manager Can Use, by William Dauphinais and Colin Price of the management consulting firm Price Waterhouse, is an accessible nuts-and-bolts examination of the way in which heads of some three dozen major corporations from around the globe look at critical matters such as motivation, creativity, customer service and revitalization. Individual chapters devoted to the reflections of top executives from powerhouses including British Airways, OshKosh B'Gosh, Pitney Bowes, and Swisscom are interspersed with sidebars that add analysis along with an overall perspective. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
The idea is as intriguing as it is simple: Why not have CEOs speak directly about the major issues that they face? The result is this uneven book, edited by the Price Waterhouse coauthors of The Paradox Principles and Better Change. When the book works, it works well. We hear a droll Colin Marshall, head of British Airways, explaining how he learned the value of customer service while serving as a cadet purser in the 1950s. Michael Z. Kay, CEO of LSG/SKY Chefs (an airline food service company), offers advice about turning around a losing venture in the form of a memo to a mythical peer. Many of the CEOs' comments, however, can be self-serving. Quips like "Monsanto is a textbook example of the courage, drive and energy it takes to create change in an organization" would have more credibility if not being made by the respective company CEOs, in this case Robert B. Shapiro. Nevertheless, from CEO reports on Siemens's experience in "Turning Supertankers into Speedboats" to Chase Manhattan's "Art of the Inclusive Merger" and Young and Rubicam's use of creative marketing as a "Core Strategy," a lot of capital ground gets covered.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Library Journal
Richard Poe reads this collection of essays by CEOs from organizations such as British Airways, Young & Rubicon, Royal Dutch/Shell, Warner-Lambert, the Carlsberg Group, and the UN High Commission for Refugees. Editors Dauphinais and Price (coauthors of The Paradox Principles, 1995, and Better Change, 1994, both Irwin), partners with international accounting firm Price Waterhouse, have assembled a collection of ideas from chief executives about motivating employees, learning from customers, breaking down management bureaucracies, unleashing creativity and innovation in the workplace, and other similarly timely topics of interest in today's business. While the narration is solid, these topics already fill the crowded management genre, and the Arthur Andersen Company's Best Practices (Audio Reviews, LJ 3/1/98) offers more substance. Recommended only for public libraries still weak in this area.?Dale Farris, Groves, TX
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
Geoffrey BrewerSales & Marketing ManagementHow refreshing: A business book written by people who actually run business...all of the corporate leaders in the book...offer compelling perspectives on the burning business issues managers face today.
Jim PawlakCleveland Plain DealerA riveting portrait of top-to-bottom thinking and decision-making in large corporations.
Product Description
Straight from the CEO reveals the practical, far-reaching insights of the world's top CEOs, including:
Royal Dutch/Shell's Cor Herkströter, mastermind of the most ambitious makeover among the world's energy behemoths;
British Airways' Sir Colin Marshall, the market genius who powered the carrier's celebrated turnaround;
Chase Manhattan's Walter Shipley, architect of one of the largest mergers ever to take place in the financial sector;
Monsanto's
Robert B. Shapiro, who has raised the hurdle bar on growth and
profitability goals, although the company is at the peak of its form;
British Aerospace's Sir Richard Evans, developer of one of Britain's biggest and boldest corporate-change management programs;
Compaq Computer's
Eckhard Pfeiffer, who has transformed himself from a successful
turnaround artist into a hard-driving champion of continuous corporate
renewal.
Straight from the CEO is a major event,
providing the rare opportunity to hear directly from the world's
greatest business leaders. 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 invaluable tool for managers at every level.
About the Author
G. William Dauphinais
is in charge of Brand Management Marketing and Communication at
PricewaterhouseCoopers and is the senior author of two previous books, The Paradox Principles and Better Change.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From Part One: Globalization
Globalization is a term that triggers strong emotions. Depending on one's point of view, it is dreaded or admired, perceived as a great leap forward or a stumble backward. It contains many references wrapped in a single word, including: the recent and projected expansion of world trade; the greater flows of direct investment to the formerly less-developed countries of Asia and Latin America; the lightning speed of technological transmission; the giant sucking sound of European and North American jobs lost to the emerging economies; the global dominance of such power brands as Toyota and Coca-Cola, CNN and Nescafé; and the wholesale deregulation of telecommunications, air transport, and energy utilities -- to name but a few of its many ingredients.
Not surprisingly, experts are divided on the importance of globalization. Certainly the majority agree with British economist Martin Wolf that it is "the great economic event of our era," while a dissident minority, including MIT economist Paul Krugman, believes that its impact has been overhyped. "What explains this propensity to overstate the importance of global markets?" he mused in the New York Times of February 13, 1997. "In part, it sounds sophisticated. Pontificating about globalization is an easy way to get attention at events like the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and Renaissance Weekends in Hilton Head, S.C."
From present-day facts, Klugman is less than half right. As he pointed out in the Times there are no Asian airlines offering local service in the U.S. But contrary to his views, there is a lot of crossborder activity in telecommunications. However, belief in the power of globalization lies not in its present reality, but in the perceived strength of its potential.
The great power of globalization can be seen in the strength of its lifeline. As a report of the International Monetary Fund dryly stated, globalization reflects "the growing economic interdependence of countries worldwide through the increasing volume and variety of cross-border transactions in goods and services and of international capital flows, and also through the more rapid and widespread diffusion of technology." This hydra-headed growth is more than another macroeconomic trend. It is shaping a new epoch where the tempo and breadth of change in the international economy both alters the character of the multinational corporation and makes porous the economic frontiers of the state. Result: a different paradigm of opportunities and interdependencies, as well as new terms and conditions for competitive success.
Just as water changes to a solid when the temperature drops one degree at the 32° mark, so there is a threshold (if humankind hasn't crossed it yet, we will soon) where the addition of one more degree of globalization will create a totally different reality in which corporations as the agents of capital and technology must adjust. This is why the subject of globalization resonates at the World Economic Forum at Davos and similar conferences and seminars, and why it has the air of historical inevitability despite the continuing vigor of trade protectionism and the spread of regional trading blocks. No corporation can run the risk of ignoring its opportunities and dangers. A company's failure of anticipatory intellect, or a lack of vigilance and preparedness, could have terrible consequences.
Big corporations in advanced countries haven't been slouches at foreign expansion in this century. However, they have been constrained by local protectionism and by a conservative approach to geopolitical risk -- a reasonable stratagem while the Cold War was in progress and domestic growth was sufficient to keep shareholders happy. While those geopolitical risks are still real, the abundant capital, technology, and overcapacity in home-base countries have made those risks more palatable than they were a decade ago.
The old multinational corporations were quasi-colonial institutions that used the less-developed world as a dumping ground for secondhand technology, and often for second-rate executives. They can't profitably do that today because of the democratization of technology, capital, and management know-how. The new factories going up in Asia and Latin America have the benefit of low wages and state-of-the-art technology. Five years ago a prediction that Bangalore, India, would become a world-class software center would have been absurd. Not anymore. In the future, we can expect centers of excellence in other technologies to crop up in many formerly unlikely places.
The properties of the truly global corporation are still in the early stages of evolution. Most CEOs are just breaking out of the old Euro and U.S.-centered values and mind-sets. They're groping for ways to make their companies more flexible and responsive to differing local environments, while preserving the advantages of global reach and scale. It's as if they're hoping to invent an amphibious octopus with another brain at the end of each tentacle.
Big oil companies are old hands at globalization in terms of geographic reach and in the ethnic diversity of their leadership. But the way even they approach the world is changing in response to a more competitive market in developed countries. Faced with a forecast of demand growth of a mere 1 or 2 percent in OECD nations, the petroleum giants are hoping to benefit from recent and prospective deregulations of state-run monopolies in other parts of the world. As a result, they're vigorously making new downstream investments in emerging economies. But for them, globalization has yet another dimension -- the quest for true enterprise integration via big investments in new communications and information systems. By reengineering their back offices, and integrating the information and business process functions of hitherto independent subsidiaries, they expect to capture economies of scale that have eluded them in the past.
Here is another important facet of the globalization phenomena: the way companies are reshaping their cultures, organizations, and systems in a quest for "seamlessness" -- melding the characteristics of centralization and decentralization in a new global synthesis. In 1996, Price Waterhouse began a bold initiative of this type. In chapter seven, on the new phase of globalization, chairman James Schiro details how this premier accounting and professional services firm has reorganized itself. While retaining the valuable attributes of the decentralized partnership form, Price Waterhouse has evolved a new global structure with superior responsiveness to client needs, and a more finely tuned service delivery of its knowledge resources. As Schiro points out, "It is no longer a compelling point of pride to declare: 'Our company has offices -- or factories -- in X countries worldwide.' All the best competitors meet that mark, and so much more is expected. Genuine points of pride have to do with global coordination coupled with well-accepted local identities."
"Think global but act local" has become the mantra of globalization discussions. Unfortunately, its frequent repetition tends to make it sound easy, when in reality it is fraught with contradiction. Complex and subtle paradoxes confront those who apply it rigorously. Just how local should "local" be in product features, image, and service delivery? Where and how does the global approach add to or detract from the local?
These are not new conundrums; as Flemming Lindeløv, Carlsberg's CEO, observes in chapter one, Carlsberg has been international for over a hundred years, because it had to leap over little Denmark's borders in search of growth. For Carlsberg, globalism comes down to projecting the image of a foreign-born premium product into local markets where taste preferences are distinctly different from Denmark's. The trick is to produce and market a local formula that nevertheless has the "feel" of a foreign product. The power of the Carlsberg brand has to be maximized in both dimensions. And its organization must move adroitly between these separate realities, each with its different needs and claims.
What makes the global economy different from the merely international is not simply the greater intensity of trade, technology, and capital flows, but the levels of complexity and the number of variables that managers must deal with. Whether it's deciding where in Asia to build a new plant or whom to team up with for Latin American distribution of a packaged goods product, the number of options are many times greater than a decade ago. So too are the interdependencies across technologies, markets, organizations. To think globally these days is to take a quantum leap in complexity. And for the time being, anyway, some facets of a company may not quite fit into a seamless whole.
So far we've talked about the good news -- the promising developments and plans and intellectual chartings. But there are areas where progress has been frustratingly slow. A requisite skill for globalization, and one in which most multinational corporations are deficient, is the need to be politically integrated into the fabric of local society, which includes countries with very different political histories and institutions than those of OECD nations.
Imagine you're the CEO of a Japanese company that four years ago built four offshore factories in South Korea. Now you want to shut two of them down and shift their output to a new factory in Kuala Lumpur. How are you going to justify your acts in Seoul? And what's the likelihood that the two remaining factories will be allowed to chug along as if nothing had happened? Yes, the global economy is more open, but it has many areas that are mined with uncertainty and danger.
The dynamics of globalization are like those of oceanic tides: There is an overall direction, but embedded within them are separate streams moving at different speeds and at different angles to the main thrust. According to an OECD study, by the year 2020 a third of world output could be accounted for by China (with the bi...
