During the past decade, I have helped place hundreds of top executives in new jobs. Through the years, I've
marveled at how some individuals are natural leaders and excel at running companies.
My colleague Tom Neff and I researched and then met with 50 of the most accomplished CEOs in American
business. We asked each to tell us what made him/her such a great leader -- and what others could learn as
they pursue their own aspirations...
CORE PRINCIPLES OF CEOS
Live with integrity -- and lead by example.
Develop a winning strategy to fulfill important customer needs. Be a "big idea" person instead of focusing on
fine details.
Build a great management team.
Inspire employees to achieve greatness.
Create a flexible and responsive organization.
Tie it all together with a merit-based compensation plan.
Don't stop learning. In addition to learning from customers, many CEOs we spoke with mentioned the works
of management guru Peter Drucker as a major influence.
Favorite texts: Essential Drucker (HarperBusiness)... Management Challenges for the 21st Century
(HarperBusiness)... Managing in a Time of Great Change (Plume).
C. MICHAEL "MIKE" ARMSTRONG
AT&T
Lesson: Don't fall in love with your desk. "You've got to meet your customers," says Armstrong. "You have to
understand your competition. You have to give the same speech too many times. You have to go to the
lunch-bag forum...
"I write an article every month for the company newspaper. I do videotapes. I do company broadcasts.
Communicate, communicate,communicate! You cannot be a remote image. You've got to be touched, felt,
heard and believed."
CAROL BARTZ
Autodesk
Lesson: Think of your career as a pyramid -- not a ladder. Too often, people go after the almighty promotion
and as a result stay in a very narrow field. They start in marketing and hope to one day be a marketing
manager... then move up to become the vice president of marketing. That approach makes sense, but it is
limiting.
"The safest, surest way to the top is to have a broad base of experience," says Bartz. "But to get that strong
base, you may have to take lateral promotions -- maybe even a step backward."
MICHAEL EISNER
The Walt Disney Company
Lesson: Obsess about the quality of your product or service. The typical manager measures performance in
terms of revenue growth or shareholder return. Eisner measures content.
"How good is the show? How does the food in the park taste?" Eisner says. "I focus maniacal attention on
the product because I have learned that a hit in our industry tends to wash away all our incompetencies."
ALAN "ACE" GREENBERG
Bear Stearns
Lesson: Promote whistle-blowers. Ethics are everyone's responsibility. People who identify lapses and
errors should be rewarded.
Greenberg pays employees 5% of the value of any error that they uncover. He has written checks for as much
as $60,000. "You don't want to rely on an internal audit committee, where it takes years to find something," he
warns. "The quickest way is for somebody who sits next to somebody to tell us he's doing something wrong."
ANDREW "ANDY" GROVE
Intel
Lesson: Pay more attention to your stars than to your laggards. Managers spend too much time trying to
improve poor performers. Focus the majority of your efforts on top performers instead. "These people
account for a disproportionately larger share of the work," Grove points out.
Concentrating on your stars offers tremendous leverage. A 2% increase in the performance of a star
employee has a much greater impact on the company than a 2% increase from a marginal employee.
HERBERT "HERB" KELLEHER
Southwest Airlines
Lesson: Focus on internal customers first. "Your employees are your most important customers," says
Kelleher. It is just as important to have the right people for, say, your finance department as it is for hiring your
sales force or top management.
"The way your finance people service other employees within the company is inevitably reflected in the
service your employees provide to the public."
FRANK RAINES
Fannie Mae
Lesson: Keep everyone on message. Workers lose track of the company's goals when they get caught up in
the day-to-day pressures of their jobs. You must create a vision that excites your employees... and adhere to
it. Make sure everyone stays on track, and determine whether new projects are part of that vision.
Ask yourself: Are we doing only those things that advance our company toward its goals?
Also ask what Drucker asks -- if you weren't already in a business, would you enter it now? With so much
competition, you cannot afford to waste time and money on extraneous efforts.
HOWARD SCHULTZ
Starbucks
Lesson: Invest the money necessary to retain great people. A decade ago, Schultz created a benefits
package called "Bean Stock." At the end of each fiscal year, everyone -- including those who work part-time --
is awarded stock options worth up to 14% of his/her base pay. And even part-time employees get a
comprehensive health plan.
"Those benefits were dramatically lower than the cost of hiring and training new people," Schultz says.
Result: Starbuck's annual turnover rate has dropped dramatically.
JOHN "JACK" WELCH, JR.
General Electric
Lesson: Pick a theme every few years, and rally the entire company around it. Welch has been driving the
idea of E-commerce and faster information flow within GE. Before that, he was pushing the concept of
boundarylessness -- breaking down corporate hierarchies to ensure that the right people attacked a
particular business problem, no matter where they were geographically or hierarchically in the company.
"People have meetings in GE where they call together all levels and solve problems," says Welch. "We went
from where the inventor was the celebrated person to where the person who took an idea from anywhere...
embellished it... and then did something with it is the hero."
How To Supercharge Your Career
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