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. ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )