
The CEO Test: Master the Challenges That Make or Break All Leaders is another inspirational and motivational book you can download it free in pdf format. The CEO Test is the authoritative, no-nonsense insider’s guide to navigating leadership’s toughest challenges, brought to you by authors uniquely qualified to tell the stories. Adam Bryant has conducted in-depth interviews with over 600 CEOs. Kevin Sharer spent more than two decades as president and then CEO of Amgen, where he led its expansion from $1 billion in annual revenue to nearly $16 billion. He has served on many boards and is a sought-after mentor to CEOs of global companies.
Book Name: | The CEO Test |
Author: | Adam Baryant |
Category: | Inspiring Books |
Language: | English |
Format: | |
Audio Cd | View on amazon |
Despite all the efforts over the years to understand what it takes to be an effective leader, the challenges of leadership remain enormously difficult and elusive; Even today, most CEOs don’t last five years. The demands to deliver at a constant high level can be relentless.
Loneliness. The weight of responsibility. The relentless doubts and criticisms. The pressure to build stellar teams. The 24/7 schedule requires superhuman stamina. Difficult decisions often leave no one happy. The expectation of always having the right answer when it can be hard to just know the right question.
These challenges are highlighted in the corner office, but they are not unique to CEOs. All leaders face their own version of these tests, and the authors draw on the distilled wisdom, stories, and lessons of hundreds of CEOs to show how every aspiring leader can master these challenges and lead like a CEO. These foundational leadership skills will make all aspiring executives more effective in their roles today and enhance their career paths. The CEO Test: Master the Challenges That Make or Break All Leaders is perfect motivational ebook.
Quite frankly, it took us several runs to distill the long lists that littered our whiteboards, but we began to make faster progress once we adopted a helpful metaphor of nesting Russian dolls to help guide our discussions. Many ideas that come up in leadership discussions, such as the importance of being trustworthy and also respecting others, are actually quite similar, and we continue to push ourselves to clarify which ideas might nest within other ideas. We also decided to focus more on the tactical skills of leadership to create a sort of playbook for how to lead effectively, rather than focusing on the intrinsic qualities of effective leaders, such as curiosity and self-awareness. After hours of healthy debate, we finally settled on the architecture of topics and subtopics that would best answer the bullet points. The CEO test is not like an SAT test; it is more in the spirit of being tested by difficult mountain climbing. The challenges we describe in the following chapters are fundamental to effective leadership and complement each other. No one can expect to be successful without a clear strategy, an effective leadership team, and a well-defined culture. From there, we’ll move on to some of the finer points of leading others, like driving change and managing crises, and then move on to the inside game of leadership. Throughout the book, we’ll note the many paradoxes that help explain why simple answers can be so elusive in understanding leadership. The insights in this book will not only make you a better leader, but will also give you a simple, effective, and valuable perspective for analyzing and evaluating other leaders, teams, and companies. To be clear, passing the CEO test doesn’t mean getting a perfect ten out of ten on each of the challenges we’ve outlined. That would be unrealistic, as we all have our strengths and weaknesses. But we do believe that to be successful in a leadership role, you must reach a certain level of proficiency in each of the skills in this book. Ignoring any one of them, or underestimating their importance, can quickly shorten a leader’s time in his chair. We know there is so much leadership advice in the world that it can quickly lead to “analysis paralysis” of trying to remember the hundred different things you’re supposed to be doing at any given moment. We’re trying to help solve that problem by curating all of those tips for this handful of critical topics, so you’ll see the biggest impact on improving your leadership skills by working in these areas. Because the focus of our book is on CEO lessons that are relevant to all leaders, there are many aspects of the CEO role that we will not address. If we were writing a book just for CEOs, we would include other key tests for CEOs, including resource allocation (expenses, capital, and people); fusions and acquisitions; managing the board of directors, investors, regulators and customers; processes for high-risk decisions; and build a portfolio of products or services to ensure future financial and competitive success. Strategy requires making decisions about what to do and what not to do, and we choose not to write about those topics in order to make this book as useful as possible for leaders at all levels.
Chapters of The CEO Test Motivational Book
Test #1: Can You Develop a Simple Plan for Your Strategy?: Simplifying complexity is a leader’s superpower.
Test #2: Can You Make the Culture Real—and Matter? It’s about walking the talk.
Test #3: Can You Build Teams That Are True Teams? They are the key to driving the strategy.
Test #4: Can You Lead Transformation? The status quo is enormously powerful, and it is the enemy of change.
Test #5: Can You Really Listen?: Danger signals can be faint, and bad news travels slowly.
Test #6: Can You Handle a Crisis? Avoid the predictable mistakes that trip up so many leaders.
Test #7: Can You Master the Inner Game of Leadership? The conflicting demands and challenges must be managed.
Notes
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