Straight from the CEO: The World's Top Leaders Reveal Ideas That Every Manager Can Use

Straight from the CEO is a major event, because the world rarely hears directly from the great contemporary business leaders—the chief movers and shapers of major corporations around the globe. Working closely with the Price Waterhouse management team, a wide variety of chief executives who are successfully managing today's rapid pace of economic change present their ideas about leading and motivating people, unleashing innovation and creativity, and learning from customers to revitalize their businesses.

Among the many CEOs represented in the book are the heads of British Airways, Compaq Computer, Monsanto, Royal Dutch/Shell, Enron, Chase Manhattan Bank, and Warner-Lambert. The scope is worldwide: from Bangkok to Oshkosh, from Dusseldorf to Dallas.

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 important tool for managers at every level, focusing on such issues as creating loyalty to customers, organizing globally, fostering individual employee motivation, and leveraging corporate values to enhance performance. These are the pressing issues that face every manager who strives to sort out important contributions from impractical ideas, the gold from the dross, and then take action that gets results. As intellectually stimulating as it is practical, Straight from the CEO is an invaluable report from the executive trenches.

• Royal Dutch/Shell's Cor Herkstr&246ter, mastermind of the most ambitious makeover among the world's energy behemoths, rewrites the book on Shell's relationships with shareholders, operating units, and managers.
• British Airways' Sir Colin Marshall, the marketing genius who powered the carrier's celebrated turnaround, shows how a management style shaped by early personal experiences taught him the importance of customers, customer service, and customization.
• Chase Manhattan's Walter Shipley, architect of one of the largest mergers ever seen in the financial sector, believes that many mergers fail to yield their promise because one partner insists on dominating the other. Shipley explains how and why his philosophy of the integrative merger, which respects the abilities of both sides and is free of power struggles, has led to several merger successes.
• Monsanto's Robert B. Shapiro has raised the hurdle bar on growth and profitability goals, although the company is at the peak of its form. He explains how the biotech giant is being transformed by programs that drive both growth and profits via novel incentives that are deeply embedded in a decentralized organization.
• Young & Rubicam's Peter Georgescu looks beyond the conventional wisdom about the present economic boom to reveal some grim truths: (1) increases in corporate profit derived from cutting fat are exhausted; (2) many thousands of factories are operating far below full capacity; (3) the no-brainer marketing ploys of the past are useless. The only way to sustain growth of sales and profits, he maintains, is through better brand-building that reflects a new and deeper relationship between brands and customers.
• British Aerospace's Sir Richard Evans developed one of Britain's biggest and boldest corporate change management programs‹an initiative that galvanized an internally divided, underperforming company and made it into a stock market favorite.
• Compaq Computer's Eckhard Pfeiffer has transformed himself from a successful turnaround artist into a hard-driving champion of continuous corporate renewal. Here, he demonstrates how continuous renewal has boosted his firm's competitive preparedness, its competencies, and its profits.