Book Review: Lessons on Leadership by Former Coca-Cola & Revlon CEO, Jack Stahl
August 14, 2023
The last time I checked, there are more than 52,000 business books in print on the subject of leadership. It is reasonable to ask, “Why another?” Jack Stahl provides his answer in this book, based on his extensive real-world experience as a senior level executive, notably as president of Coca-Cola and then, until recently, CEO of Revlon. True, both are major corporations. However, Stahl asserts - and I wholeheartedly agree - that “organizational dynamics are often similar in different environments, and most of the important leadership skills and techniques presented here will apply across diverse organizations large and small, and to various management roles. The frameworks are guidelines that I know have helped me.”
Specifically, Stahl focuses on seven “frameworks” and devotes a separate chapter to each, with “Key Points” and “Leadership Insights” featured:
1. Leadership and Management: “A modest view of your future brings modest results and rewards. Think big and give people the opportunity to win big.” This is what Jim Collins calls a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG).
2. Creating a high-capability organization: “People focus on those skills and behaviors that leaders say count.” Also, what they reward.
3. Developing people: “And important oversight technique for major projects is to schedule frequent project updates, and be sure that when someone says something is done, it is totally complete.”
4. Brand positioning with consumers, clients, customers, etc.: “A `brand’ represents a promise to consumers of what to expect from a product or service. Brand positioning is the process of establishing that promise in the minds of the reader.”
5. Customer relationship management (CRM): “Asking questions and listening patiently and carefully - in order to understand your customer’s business, where they want to take it, and how well you are serving it - is the foundation of great service.”
6. Financial strategy and management: “As the leader, you must help make clear to your people the link between their actions and the creation of value for your company.” Also, and at least as important, the creation of value for each customer.
7. Influencing people: “I have presented six frameworks for creating leadership success. The seventh is a linchpin for them all because success in any leadership role will depend upon your ability to effectively influence people to take actions to achieve success.”
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The Brand Called YOU
August 7, 2023
In an age of faceless corporations, free online advice, and companies that deliver rubber-stamped services, entrepreneurs who realize that they are the real commodity, not their products, will set themselves apart from the competition. Let Personal Branding expert Peter Montoya show you how to turn YOU into a “brand” in this brand-driven society and how to use your Personal Brand to generate better results, more clients, and greater profits.
In an era of faceless corporations and online advice, the best way an entrepreneur can succeed resides in his or her ability to market a strong Personal Brand. Individuals who market themselves as “product experts,” or whose services are not adequately unique or specialized, risk blending into the background or being replaced by larger competitors in their industry.
In the face of grim prospects and competition, some thoughtful entrepreneurs are taking a different approach — packaging themselves as the product through creative, aggressive marketing.
As opposed to “product-” or “fact-based” marketing, Personal Branding uses brochures, logos, direct mail, the Internet, public relations, and other channels, not merely the salespeople, to position entrepreneurs as the brand of choice.
Personal Branding promotes an identity of the individual that communicates on an entirely new level and gives consumers a reason to choose your products or services over those of your competitors.
What will your name attract?
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C.E.O. Libraries Reveal Keys to Success
July 21, 2023
Michael Moritz, the venture capitalist who built a personal $1.5 billion fortune discovering the likes of Google, YouTube, Yahoo and PayPal, and taking them public, may seem preternaturally in tune with new media. But it is the imprint of old media — books by the thousands sprawling through his Bay Area house — that occupies his mind.
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Books in the California home of Michael Moritz.
“My wife calls me the Imelda Marcos of books,” Mr. Moritz said in an interview. “As soon as a book enters our home it is guaranteed a permanent place in our lives. Because I have never been able to part with even one, they have gradually accumulated like sediment.”
Serious leaders who are serious readers build personal libraries dedicated to how to think, not how to compete. Ken Lopez, a bookseller in Hadley, Mass., says it is impossible to put together a serious library on almost any subject for less than several hundred thousand dollars.
Perhaps that is why — more than their sex lives or bank accounts — chief executives keep their libraries private. Few Nike colleagues, for example, ever saw the personal library of the founder, Phil Knight, a room behind his formal office. To enter, one had to remove one’s shoes and bow: the ceilings were low, the space intimate, the degree of reverence demanded for these volumes on Asian history, art and poetry greater than any the self-effacing Mr. Knight, who is no longer chief executive, demanded for himself.
The Knight collection remains in the Nike headquarters. “Of course the library still exists,” Mr. Knight said in an interview. “I’m always learning.”
Until recently when Steven P. Jobs of Apple sold his collection, he reportedly had an “inexhaustible interest” in the books of William Blake — the mad visionary 18th-century mystic poet and artist. Perhaps future historians will track down Mr. Jobs’s Blake library to trace the inspiration for Pixar and the grail-like appeal of the iPhone.
If there is a C.E.O. canon, its rule is this: “Don’t follow your mentors, follow your mentors’ mentors,” suggests David Leach, chief executive of the American Medical Association’s accreditation division. Mr. Leach has stocked his cabin in the woods of North Carolina with the collected works of Aristotle.
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Executive Intelligence
July 21, 2023
by Travis Wright
I’m currently reading this great book on leadership, called Executive Intelligence by Justin Menkes. This book delivers many gems, such as this quote from Andrea Jung, CEO of Avon:
“Decision-making in today’s business environment is decentralized. Decisions are made at the local level, or at a functional or operating level. You can’t grow a business around two to three good thinkers anymore, because your success depends on quality decisions from people at every level- salespeople, marketing people, strategy people, and so on. Everyone has to be able to think smart.
If you don’t have the right amount of quality thinking in a complex growth company like ours, it is going to manifest itself in terms of marginalized discussions that rely upon wrong inputs and unskilled questions. And that’s what drags down businesses. Thats’s why companies don’t have good minds throughout their ranks get stuck at 100 million in revenue and don’t get to 1 billion.”
Executive Intelligence is a book for people who are leaders or looking to become a leader. Decide to be the best you can become. Find others with a similar outlook, then move forward as a collective team. There are no lone eagles. It is a nest of eagles…. all moving in unison.
Great book. Get it.
