Adam BryantCritiques

I recently saw a stack of seven books on a city manager's desk; one was a dictionary of finance terms and another was The Daily Stoic and I decided to read the other five, of which this was one. This is the fourth of those five that I've read and it definitely is the most quotable. Arranged in three parts - Succeeding, Managing, and Leadership - the author culled thoughts and advice, lessons learned, and stories from a staggering 70+ interviews, and he derviced common themes...Succeeding for eaxmple:"The qualities these executives share: Passionate curiosity. Battle-hardened confidence. Team smarts. A simple mindset. Fearlessness." Bryant curated from those interviews, because

For this book, I was interested in pursuing a different story line about CEOs—their own personal stories, free of numbers, theories, jargon, charts, and with minimal discussions of their companies or industries. I wanted to hear what they had learned from their ups and downs, their stories about how they learned to lead, the mistakes they made along the way, how they fostered supportive corporate cultures, and how they do the same things that every other manager does—interview job candidates, run meetings, promote teamwork, manage their time, and give and get feedback.

Any reader should be able to highlight a number of observations in here, whether reflections of parts of themselves, wishes for directions to take, perhaps even practices to avoid. It's a nice assembly with enough takeaways to hit somebody's sweetspot.

Selected highlights (I made a lot more notes, some good ones on interviewing, observing, more):

"You learn from everybody,” said Alan R. Mulally, the CEO of the Ford Motor Company. “I’ve always just wanted to learn everything, to understand anybody that I was around—why they thought what they did, why they did what they did, what worked for them, what didn’t work.”

Tim Brown:

“I do think that’s something we forget,” said Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO, the design consulting firm. “As leaders, probably the most important role we can play is asking the right questions. But the bit we forget is that it is, in itself, a creative pro cess. Those right questions aren’t just kind of lying around on the ground to be picked up and asked. When I go back and look at the great leaders—Roosevelt, Churchill—one of the things that occur to me is they somehow had the ability to frame the question in a way that nobody else would have thought about. In design, that’s everything, right?"

I took from Brown's Change by Design, one question, well, paradigm, is to use "How Can We...?" approach, not just for design as Brown would have, but for solving problems in general.

"How do CEOs build a sense of teamwork, and not just team spirit?" This is important. Rah Rah doesn't get the job done.

Gordon Bethune said "As I went up the ladder in the Navy, I never forgot what it’s like to be down the ladder, and that being good at your job is predicated pretty much on how the people working for you feel." I preached and mentored the same thing as I went up the ladder in the Navy: never forget where you came from and do you best to avoid the approaches you didn't like happening to you.

Tachi Yamada says

Learning how to delegate, learning how to let go and still make sure that everything happened, was a very important lesson in my first role in management. And that’s where I learned a principle that I apply today—I don’t micromanage, but I have micro-interest. I do know the details. I do care about the details. I feel like I have intimate knowledge of what’s going on, but I don’t tell people what to do.

I like this. I don't micromanage, but there are definitely times when I care about the details, or have to care because of the responsibility.

Carol Bartz of Yahoo: "I wasn’t given this advice, but this is what happened in my life,” she said. “You need to build your career not as a ladder, but as a pyramid. You need to have a base of experience because it’s a much more stable structure.
Obvious, right?

Bryant observes on CEOs

As much as people can try to prepare for these jobs, they’re likely to feel blindsided. That’s a lesson many CEOs share, and their experiences are useful for managers at all levels, helping them to prepare for promotions into new roles, and to develop their sensitivity to the potential outsized impact of a small gesture or an off-hand remark. Management jobs are a very public form of on-the-job training—people have to learn how to handle the work under the bright lights of center stage as employees scrutinize every move. The sooner executives appear comfortable in the role, the quicker they will win the confidence of employees. The reality of management has a way of steamrolling the theory of management, particularly for anyone taking on such a role for the first time.

This is true at any level, not just CEO.

Anne Mulcahy, the former Xerox CEO:

Most people in my position would say that as much as we’ll whine about traveling, time on planes probably is critically important to us doing our jobs. It’s time to be reflective. It’s time to catch up. It’s time to really be thoughtful and communicate. So I get off a plane with just a ton done, and that’s really important in terms of time management.

Enforced “down” time is important. If I’m at a conference and in between seminars, or just over in the corner thinking about what’s been said, I’ll take the time to think about “the business” in ways I haven’t in a while… and come back with ideas. Annoys my staff sometimes!

Susan Docherty, a vice president at General Motors,

said she doesn’t like assigned seats in a meeting room. “I always sit in a different chair,” she said. “When I was in different roles in this company, I saw a lot of leaders sit in the same chair, think the same way and talk to the same people. And I said to myself, ‘When I become a leader, and I have a big team, I’m not going to play favorites. I want to be a dynamic leader.’ And I think being disruptive, not always being predictable, is healthy.”

I like to do this, too. I will sit in different spots to shake things up, especially seats where people have hung up their planks. And depending on the type of meeting, I'll sit in different spots to watch, and sometimes nudge, the interactions.

Robert W. Selander, the CEO of MasterCard "learned to hold back on expressing his opinion. 'As you become more senior in a company, you tend to be viewed as more authoritative when you speak and therefore you have to back off a little bit.'" Important lesson that so many never seem to learn.

Deborah Dunsire of Millennium "said that management-by-walking-around is essential—not just for getting feedback, but also for retaining talented employees." Oh yeah. 100% this.

"What’s the difference between management and leadership? Management is about results."
"Leadership is an art."
"People report to managers, but they follow leaders."

There is a lot more and other readers will obviously pull different points that resonate with them.

I got a copy of this book through a Goodreads giveaway in return for a honest review.

While I find that there is a lot of information regarding start-ups I found it difficult to apply to a small business. If you are looking to start a larger company and have no management classes under your belt, this book would be great.

A note about these newly posted non-link reviews.

I suppose that one of the nice things about the LibraryThing.com “Early Reviewer” program is that it's like a grab-bag gift exchange, but instead of the shape of the item, and how it's wrapped, the way you end up guessing what you're going to like is the paragraph or so of promo copy that the publishers provide about the book. Yes, you're way ahead of the game vs. a “pig in a poke” pick-a-gift in that you sort of know what you're getting … but I'm finding that I'm only rarely reading the book I thought I was requesting. Today's title is another example of this.

Now, I guess if I had heard of the author, or of his New York Times column, or previous book, I might have had a better sense of what was coming. But when the description said that Adam Bryant had interviewed “more than two hundred” (a figure that keeps coming up, even though less than 150 seem to have actually made it into the book) CEOs for this, I figured that Quick and Nimble: Lessons from Leading CEOs on How to Create a Culture of Innovation was going to be a series of interviews (or highlights thereof) extracting from these leaders their “wisdom and guidance to move an organization faster, to be quick and nimble, and to rekindle the whatever-it-takes collective spark of a start-up, all with the goal of innovating and thriving in a relentlessly challenging global economy”. But it's not.

Frankly, what Bryant has done here is much easier to digest than what would have been the case were it to have been just interview after interview, but it took me a bit longer than half the book to come up with a model of what was going on in it. The material here is fascinating, and I was getting the feeling after each chapter that I'd just attended a really interesting seminar by top-notch experts on a particular subject … and it struck me that this book was somewhat like a series of sixteen heavily-moderated (since everything is woven through Bryant's narration) panel presentations, each with a different mix of CEOs (although a few of them keep showing up across the book), and each chapter pretty much free-standing like that.

Now, had I had that perception going in, I might have gotten more from the earlier parts, when I was still trying to “figure it out” … I kept finding myself enjoying the book when actually reading it, but having a hard time picking it up in favor of other things I was reading (although I must admit, I did finish this first of the three books I started reading in the first week of January). Given this, it might be useful to walk through Quick and Nimble's chapters (with a brief note on my take on the “theme” of each) to see what these “expert panel seminars” are discussing:

1. Why Culture Matters (“culture eats strategy for breakfast”)


2. A Simple Plan (mission statements, measurable goals, etc.)


3. Rules of the Road (values that steer your company)


4. A Little Respect (bad bosses and behaviors)


5. It's About the Team (working together, relying on each other)


6. Adult Conversations (“tough love” for the greater good)


7. The Hazards of E-mail (easy to misinterpret, easy to abuse)


8. Play It Again and Again (constantly communicating)


9. Building Better Managers (not everybody comes equipped)


10. Surfacing Problems (researching how things really work in-house)


11. School Never Ends (not growing = dying)


12. The Art of Smarter Meetings (optimizing those sometimes-necessary evils)


13. Knocking Down Silos (how to avoid tribalism)


14. Sparking Innovation (keeping things fresh, and hungry)


15. Can We Have Some Fun? (some silliness solidifies solidarity)


16. Alone at the Top (trust, urgency, and change)

Again, there are a lot of voices here, perhaps a dozen or more on some of these, so there's more of a “lively give-and-take” than a definitive statement in any … although, obviously, the author is constructing a pathway to a particular point with each. Because of this structure, I found it difficult to pinpoint specific statements to hold out as illustrative of their subjects. I did, however, end up bookmarking a couple of things that somewhat stood out to me.

One of these is sort of second-hand, coming from AOL's Steve Case, but in this quoting a fellow founder of the online service, Jim Kimsey. Case says that his view in the early part of his career was that “looking like you're working hard mattered”, but he relates Kimsey's insistence that “the art is trying to set the priorities and assemble a team so you wake up in the morning and actually have nothing to do”. He continues with:

The objective should not be looking busy, but actually creating a process that allows great things to happen in a way that you can be less involved. So it was sort of a process of letting go, which is hard for entrepreneurs. But at some point you've got to let go and you've got to step back. Ultimately that is about trusting the people you've got but also trusting yourself, that you've set the right context in terms of the vision, the priorities, the team.

I don't think anybody would be surprised that this is the opening part of the “Alone at the Top” chapter, but it's a good sampling of the sort of material that fills Quick and Nimble. Some of it runs close to “common wisdom”, what' you'd expect, but a good deal goes counter to what one would guess to work best.

One other quote that stood out here was in this category, coming from Marcus Ryu of Guidewire, from the “Play It Again and Again” chapter:

Even though we talk about how important rationality is in the company, I've come to accept that rationality plays a very limited role in persuasion, and that it's mostly about emotion. It's mostly about empathy and about authenticity and about commitment. … {S}ort of a corollary to that, is about communicating with large groups of people. I've come to realize that no matter how smart the people are that you're communicating to, the more of them there are, the dumber the collective gets. And so you could have a room full of Einsteins, but if there are two hundred or three hundred of them, then you still have to talk to them like they're just average people. As the audience gets bigger and bigger, the bullet-point list has to be shorter and shorter, and the messages have to be simpler and simpler.

Which is, I guess, a more round-about way to get to the classic “KISS” advice for Keeping It Simple.

Anyway, as noted, reading Quick and Nimble is very much like sitting through a series of top-talent panel-based seminars, with input from a remarkable selection of CEOs across a very wide assortment of industries, and I almost feel like one should get a certificate for finishing it (not that the book is a difficult read by any measure). This has been out for less than two weeks at this point, so you should be find it in the “new releases” sections of the remaining business-oriented brick-and-mortar book vendors, but the on-line behemoths are currently knocking off a quarter of the cover price on the hardback. Anybody with an interest in business, marketing, and innovation should consider picking this up … it's quite the experience!

CMP.Ly/1

A link to my "real" review:
BTRIPP's review of Adam Bryant's Quick and Nimble: Lessons from Leading CEOs on How to Create a Culture of Innovation (1227 words)

I received an ARC through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, and quickly dove into this text. I really appreciate the topical approach, with a variety of real-world examples to illustrate the principles in play. With a variety of what amounts to miniature case studies, Bryant does an excellent job of defining the principle, discussing its implementation in existing companies, and providing suggestions for the reader to utilize it in his or her own organization. While this isn't necessarily ground-breaking, it is an effective treatment with some fresh perspective on good ideas.

Adam Bryant interviews hundreds of CEO's from Jeff Weiner to Mario Batali. These interviews give excellent advice on how to create effective culture in the organization. This is a book that would be valuable for leaders from small business owners to CEO's to read and reread. Some of the techniques these CEO's use I feel might cause too much tension in many organizations but many of them are really innovative.

Received this through Early Reviewers and was thoroughly surprised with its common sense and astute business advice. Actually, fairly good ideas on how to handle relationships outside the business world in an ethical manner.

For his new book, "The Corner Office," Adam Bryant interviewed dozens of successful business executives and leaders to answer a simple question: "How did you get to where you are?" The result is not your typical management how-to but a chance to be the "fly on the wall" as these leaders share their stories, suggestions, advice, and lessons for new and experienced managers and leaders.

Bryant organizes the book around three broad themes: "Succeeding," "Managing," and "Leading." The advantage of this structure is that readers are able to pick and choose sections to read based on their experiences and needs; there is no need to start at page one and plow through to the end.

I'd also like to commend Bryant for staying out of the way of the CEOs themselves. His prose is simple and to the point, serving to bridge the selections from his interviews rather than distracting from them.

While I wouldn't recommend this as a first book on management, it is a useful supplement for further reflection and insights.

By being grounded in interviews with practicing CEOs, this book does not fall into the platitude-ridden traps of many management books. It thus contains tons of good advice for managers of many levels. As CEOs face the unique challenge of managing an entire organization, the advice will, at time, sometimes seem a little distant to managers of staff (line managers). However, managers of managers (i.e. Sr. Managers, Directors, VPs) will find a wealth of applicable advice.

Adam Bryant's writing style is fluid and lively, as would be expected from a newspaper writer. And he clearly connects with his interviewees, drawing out anecdotes from their past as well as a number of generally applicable aphorisms. He demonstrates a genuine skill in combing through a large number of interviews and drawing out common themes.

While infrequent, there some discussion with the interviewees about how they struggled and evolved their style. While there weren't many stories about how the interviewees learned what they learned, those that were present were helpful.

Regardless, this book already has a number of bent pages and highlighter marks. And I anticipate that it will be loaned out frequently.

Disclosure: I received a complimentary LibraryThing Early Reviewer copy of the book.½

The Corner Office
A good read for any level of management. Some of the stories are priceless. The Corner Office is highly recommended for entry level managers who want to take a break from all the tomes on management that are presently on the market. It would be invaluable to seasoned managers to keep those skills fresh.
Adam Bryant has a great writing style. It flows, which is important in a work about succeeding as a manger and a leader. True, Bryant has a plethora of material to work with given the amount of quotes at his disposal but there is a gift in putting all this material together in a way that gets its message across to the reader and, more importantly, retains a high level of interest for the reader.
Nuggets-of-gold statements, such as “Don’t micro-manage but have micro-interest,” pepper this work and serve to supplement the strong chapters. One strong chapter is “Smart Interviewing.” This in itself is a tool of great value that will help managers avoid the pitfalls that are inherent in finding that right candidate for an open position. The open-ended questions are brilliant and thought provoking, which is the purpose. You need to see that the new recruit can think on his feet.
Anecdotes by corporate giants like Terry Lundgren and Joe Plumeri are excellent and serve to confirm that one of the most important aspects of management and leadership is the “human” element. Perhaps the most telling example of this involves a general, a private of a platoon doing infantry operations in terrible weather and the importance of small gestures. You’ll have to read it for yourself, though. Those stories, along with many others in this book, are well worth the read.
Enjoy.

The advice in this book is useful. Bryant gleans the best advice from a larger number of effective leaders, and he delivers it in a simple, conversational format. I enjoyed reading this book and found it worth my time, despite having read quite a bit in this genre.

I won this as part of Library Thing's Early Reviewer program. Mr. Bryant is the author of the NY Times' "Corner Office" column. As a result, he interviews many Chief Executive Officers (CEOs). This book analyzes those interviews in an attempt to document common themes identified by a wide variety of CEOs as they relate to leadership.

The book is divided into three parts -- Succeeding, Managing, and Leading. While most CEOs interviewed seemed to be on the fast track for leadership, it's clear that for many the path was not an express lane. They had some lessons to learn along the way, and they share those lessons.

If you're wondering what it takes to be a top leader -- either to quantify qualities you identify in others or to see how you measure up, this book will help you do that while providing a path to follow if you decide you want to pursue a top leadership role. I highly recommend this book.

I am not a CEO-- however, I hope CEO's, Managers, Regional Managers, Plant managers find this book into their hands.
The info that was shared by the companies is very true in the real work place-people are very easily distracted, people are on a time constrants, people are in a hurry to get to the point everyday. His research for the book was very applicable to any work enviorment.
I found the book to be very helpfull to see what goes on in big companies, big meetings also goes on in small mid-companies.
I can apply what I learned in this book to all of my employees to better make them aware of why challenged people climb the ladder, and content people climb slowly. His insight to leadership, communication, peoples highs and lows, attitudes are awesome to understand. I would recommend this book to any employee- CEO or not,

How to lead and how to be successful in business are two mysteries many of us seek to solve every day. No wonder there is a long list of books that cover one or the other, or both of these topics. How to lead and how to succeed are the topics of The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOS on How to Lead and Succeed, by New York Times columnist Adam Bryant. The book is essentially a compilation of quotes from CEO’s whom Bryant has interviewed for his column, interspersed with some of Bryant’s own conclusions and syntheses. The result is somewhat tepid, an occasional kernel of wisdom, mixed in with much that is familiar to anyone who has read up on leadership or business.

The book’s sub-title calls the lessons addressed between its covers “Indispensable and Unexpected.” “Indispensable,” yes. “Unexpected,” for the most part, no, unless you’ve never before run into concepts such as failure breeds success. One CEO remarked, “If you’ve ever had a setback and come back from it, I think it helps you make better decisions.” That is indispensable advice, but surprising only to those who have never read a quality book on business or leadership.

For those just starting out on their path to learning about leadership and business, this book can be a non-challenging first step. And there is certainly some useful stuff here. For example, I like the author’s term, “passionate curiosity,” his shorthand expression for “an infectious sense of fascination with everything around them.” Bryant, who attributes this concept to Neil Minow, “the co-founder of the Corporate Library,” sees this as one common quality that “helps set [successful] CEOs apart.”

Nevertheless, I come away feeling this book could have been something more. Bryant writes that in the book, “I have tried to play the role of dinner-party host, encouraging lively discussion and pointing out connections among the people gathered.” What is missing, however, is a sense of interaction between those metaphorical dinner party guests, the sense that there is actually a conversation going on. Rather than just recycling quotes from a wide variety of CEOs—and there are about 75 CEOs quoted in this book--the author may have produced a more useful tool if there were the sense that there is some interaction going on, if the author had compared and contrasted the philosophies, styles, and approaches of the quoted CEOs.

Perhaps having laid the foundation in this book, Bryant could move further in that direction in his next one.

The Corner Office is not your typical management/leadership books. First - it is incredibly readable - it just flows through the various topics. It is so readable because the author has used a series of personal stories from past and present CEOs to tell the story. It becomes very personable and very easy to relate to. Secondly, it is simple - Adam Bryant has pulled together lessons learned from interviewing 75 CEOs and leaders across various industries over the years and has distilled these inteviews into a series of well-thought out, and instructive lessons. Organized into three broad sections; Succeeding, Managing, and Leading; he addresses key characteristics for each. I found myself conducting a personal inventory of each characteristic as I was reading. Great stuff.

There are a lot of books on leadership but Adam Bryant has written one that I highly encourage anyone interested in really seeing how leaders not only lead but how they learned to lead. By doing a masterful job of weaving together interviews from 75 past and present CEOs in a wide variety of areas. Mr. Bryant shares valuable insights for aspiring leaders. Whether you are about to graduate from college or have already spent a number of years in industry this is a book you should read, bookmark, highlight and keep on your bed stand. It is well written and well paced. He has divided the chapters into three sections: succeeding, managing, and leading. They are all excellent but I must say that the first two sections were my favorites.