The Transformative CEO

The Transformative CEO: Impact Lessons from Industry Game Changes

by Jeffrey J. Fox and Robert Reiss

About the Reference

The Transformative CEO by Jeffrey J. Fox and Robert Reiss identifies a number of common personal qualities and approaches taken by celebrity CEOs in building or turning around their companies. Jeffrey and Robert then breakdown these items into supporting subparts and provides a series of quotes from notable CEOs in support of each subpart.

Specific topics covered by The Transformative CEO include:

Turning around a company
Building superior customer service
Thinking big and going global
Performing while transforming
Having a higher purpose
Innovating and making everything better

Why You Should Not Buy This Book

StrategyDriven Contributors found The Transformative CEO to be shallow and largely uninsightful. While the book does provide some overarching characteristics and approaches of successful chief executives, we found many of these items to be common sense truisms, philosophies most junior managers and graduate level business students would stipulate. That renown CEOs agree with these premises serves to give them credibility but does little to suggest how the reader should implement the recommended approaches.

The book suggests actions to improve the management decision-making process. Surprisingly, these actions – the most valuable and explicit points made in the book – are largely unsupported by CEO comments.

Alternative Recommendation

StrategyDriven Contributors believe there are certain qualities, characteristics, and approaches common among successful CEOs. Furthermore, we believe CEOs set the tone and tenor of the organization over which they preside and so embodying these traits is important.

We recommend The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done by Peter F. Drucker as a superior resource for learning about the admirable qualities of an executive. Through his book, Dr. Drucker provides readers with the specific actionable steps necessary to become more effective as leaders through improved decision-making and action.

Click here to read our review of The Effective Executive.