The Complete CEO

Book excerpt: Business success comes neither easily nor quickly. What is needed is a practical guide to achieving peak performance recognising your starting point and telling you what is required to achieve your goals. The Complete CEO does exactly this by providing a comprehensive framework against which any business leader can assess their strengths and weaknesses. The Complete CEO combines invaluable insights from some of the most successful CEOs in North America and Northern Europe along with the authors’ extensive knowledge and experience to create a complete programme for you and your business to achieve peak corporate and individual performance. The Complete CEO distils learning built up over the last ten years from 1000 leaders of the world’s largest quoted companies. By comparing the ways these leaders ran their businesses with their long-term performance, you will be able to see what works in practice and how to make it work for you. The Complete CEO is not a conventional business book and recognises there are no shortcuts to greatness. Even great CEOs have important areas of relative weakness. The tailored model of high performance presented in this book will be of enormous value to anyone who aspires to be a high-performing CEO. “The Complete CEO is an excellent handbook for any manager or leader. I keep it within reach.” —Mervyn Davies. CEO Standard Chartered Bank Plc “This book is helpful to any CEO, or indeed any business manager, who wants to deliver sustained high performance.” —Jim Nicol, CEO Tomkins Plc “As CEO of a newly floated business, I have found The Complete CEO to give extremely helpful focus, as well as practical tools.” —Heikki Sirviö, CEO Kemira Growhow “The Complete CEO is a fascinating book. While it won’t turn the average CEO into Warren Buffett, it does contain a wealth of uncommon, common sense wisdom, which will take him or her a number of steps in his direction.” —James O’Loughlin, Author, The Real Warren Buffett “The ultimate test of a CEO is value creation. Yet few are prepared for the task. This book will be of practical help to anyone who seriously takes up this challenge.” —Sir Brian Pitman, Former CEO And Chairman Of Lloyds TSB “I believe that the High Performance Model described in this book will be of value to any business leader – but especially to one new in post, or one who has good reason to introduce change.” —Sten Scheibye, CEO Coloplast “The High Performance Model at the core of the book, moves from a clear and insightful discussion of what drives the creation and maintenance of a winning business model into a decomposition of the role of the CEO. The authors have worked with a number of highly successful CEOs and former CEOs to understand the essence of their success, and the actions they have taken day-to-day to drive it; and the result is a practical, easy-to-understand guide.” —From The Foreword By Ben Verwaayen, CEO BT Plc