Summaries of the Books that Guide America's Elite CEOs

264 Pages·2015·1.42 MB·English

Summaries of the Books
that Guide America’s Elite CEOs
F O R T U N E
50 0
J ULIA WITTR O CK GR A NT HENSEL

What the Fortune 500 Read:
Summaries of the Books That Guide
America’s Elite CEOs
Grant Hensel
Julia Wittrock
DESIGN BY JACOB WEINZETTEL
Copyright © 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this publication text may be uploaded
or posted online without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Introduction 9
Building A Great Company
Good To Great 13
Great By Choice 19
The Outsiders 24
Built To Last 28
The Advantage 33
In Search Of Excellence 38
How The Mighty Fall 41
Winning 46
Change
Execution 52
Leading Change 57
Our Iceberg Is Melting 62
Global Tilt 67
The Goal 70
Switch 75
Communication
Getting To Yes 81
Made To Stick 86
Give And Take 91
Epic Stories
Team Of Rivals 98
Moneyball 103
The Innovators 106
Steve Jobs 110
Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? 115
American Icon 119
Titan 123
Abundance 128
The Big Short 133
Business Adventures 137
Barbarians At The Gate 142
Only The Paranoid Survive 146
Wealth Of Nations 151
Leadership
The Effective Executive 156
The Speed Of Trust 162
True North 167
Leadership Is An Art 173
Wooden On Leadership 176
The Five Temptations Of A Ceo 180
The Power Of Many 184
Taking People With You 188
Management
The Leadership Pipeline 192
Management 196
The Will To Manage 200
The Five Dysfunctions Of A Team 204
Strategy
Competitive Strategy 209
Blue Ocean Strategy 216
The Strategist Ceo 220
Playing To Win 225
Personal Development
The Bible 231
The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People 236
Lincoln On Leadership 241
Strengthsfinder 2.0 246
Never Eat Alone 250
The Power Of Habit 255
Conclusion 261
Introduction
WHAT THE FORTUNE 500 READ
You could have written this book.
Take a moment and notice how your brain instinctively
responded to the statement above. Did it invoke curiosity,
skepticism, excitement, disbelief?
Now listen to the story of how What the Fortune 500 Read
came about, and see how your view changes.
We (Julia Wittrock and Grant Hensel) love learning about
business and wanted to know which books to focus our
time on. A mutual friend, Miles, suggested we ask the
CEOs of Fortune 500 companies for recommendations,
and with that we were off to the races.
To begin, we drafted an incredibly short letter – two sen-
tences – to communicate a three crucial points to the For-
tune CEOs:
- Your accomplishments are incredible
- Your advice is invaluable to us
- We would love to read your favorite business book
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WHAT THE FORTUNE 500 READ
And with that, we bought fancy paper, printed 500 cop-
ies, added our signature and a hand-written P.S., and put
them in the mail, destined for each company’s corporate
headquarters.
Three days later, the avalanche started.
We remember getting the first personal email in response
only a few days later, and marveling at how efficient
the corporate mail processing systems must have been.
We remember the first phone call with a CEO, who was
impressed with our initiative and wanted to say hi. We
remember a moment the next week when we got over 30
recommendations in a single day.
When it was all said and done, 150 CEOs recommended
books. Given that these individuals have nearly unlimited
amounts of work to do, the fact that so many would take
time to personally help complete strangers, expecting
nothing in return, is astonishing. Generous folks appar-
ently end up at the top surprisingly often. This is a lesson
we will remember long after writing this book: we have a
responsibility to guide and mentor the next generation.
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