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Corporate titans and politicians who would like to be statesmen ought to read this book and heed the lessons offered.
Even the companies that work in this area can be unprepared. A young CEO may suddenly jump to another company (as Ray Gilmartin did from Becton Dickinson to Merck), die unexpectedly of a heart attack (as Jerry Junkins did at Texas Instruments), or fail to perform to the board's expectations (as has happened to many companies). Couple that with the fact that irresistible forces may mean that the style that worked well in the past won't wash any more, and apparent succession preparation can equal being totally clueless.
The authors are headhunters with Spencer Stuart and share what they learned in interviews during 1996 and 1997 at Met Life, Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard, Mobil, Continental Grain, SmithKline Beecham, Delta, Mellon Bank, Bestfoods, Foster Wheeler, Hercules, and GTE. They also interspace other examples. One of the difficulties with a book like this is that things don't always turn out as they seem. A lot of praise in the book goes into Coca-Cola's preparation for the unexpected death of Roberto Goizueta. Douglas Ivester is quickly invested, which is where the book ends. But we know that he also was almost as quickly divested as he turned out to be a poor replacement. This replacing CEOs is a tough business. As irresistible forces become stronger and more volatile, replacements will probably occur even more frequently.
The book concludes that 10 key practices are required: Have a strong, involved board; continually expose the top management team to the board; encourage the next generation of CEO prospects to get early experience with outside boards, the media, and the financial community; create an active executive or operating committee so more executives get exposure to an overview of the company, its strategy and issues; do succession planning on an on-going, real-time basis; take as much human drama out of the process as possible (it's especially hard on number twos); tie some of the CEO's compensation to succession planning and progress; have the directors be paid in stock and make additional investments in the company's shares; calibrate the internal candidates with external ones; and develop a culture that encourages succession (a la Built to Last).
So much for the summary. Here are the problems. Although this book purports to be a best practice book, it does not investigate enough companies to succeed. This is actually a limited survey of practices, with picking out some that seem to work better. To be accurate, such a survey would have had to consider in equivalent detail at least 400 companies. A handful won't cut it.
Second, they have to measure of success in succession. They obviously like some better than others. Without some success measure, you cannot pick out best practices.
Third, the book plugs a service that appears to be from Spencer Stuart in callibrating internal and external candidates. To me, that made the book read like a virtual ad rather than a book about management practices.
Fourth, the audience spoken to was mostly boards and CEOs. There are a lot of other stakeholders out there, like customers, employees, suppliers, distributors, and the communities the companies serve. Shouldn't their reaction be considered in deciding which successions work well and which do not?
I could go on, but you get the idea. The authors needed someone to help them design a methodology before they started. Without one, they have produced a book, and some of what it says seems to make sense. With an appropriate methodology, I am sure they could have produced a much better book.
If you want more information on the subject, your best source in my opinion is to read the case studies in Directors & Boards, a magazine devoted to corporate governance. The material I have read in that magazine is consistently superior to what is in this book.
Good luck in overcoming your disbelief stall that people who recruit CEOs should know how to determine best practices in the area of CEO succession.
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I can't wait for the movie!!
The book makes you wonder what goes on behind the walls of Corporate America.
I can't wait to read his next book and hope to see it in bookstores soon !
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Please, don't pass this book up just because it's not Frank Miller. It does have good stories in it (all except for one...surprisingly, it's the Frank Miller issue [Frank only wrote one issue and co-wrote another out of all the issues collected in here, by the way]), and the art is very good. While none of what you read in Love's Labor's Lost will be forever remembered as some of Daredevil's most defining and infamous moments (save, perhaps, Heather Glenn's suicide), all this book does is give more strength to the character of Matt Murdock/Daredevil, thus showing that he doesn't need Frank Miller to be good.
This book shows that he's great just by himself.
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Five stars for tracking down and formatting the immense volume of material in this book, and five stars for having the couage to print it. A bargain at any price- in fact I'll trade my copy for a nice Texas gusher, if anyone's interested...
Scweitzer, however, outlines the book MASSIVELY well. He does not skimp on details and progress of the studies for each scholar he mentions and being a Theology professor himself, I do tip my hat to his studies. He does them well. He states more the studies of other scholars and does not go so much into what he has discovered. But I do feel that since this was written, there is much evidence against claims made in the book and, if you agree with the progress of the Historical Jesus studies, much better work out there, even by the Jesus Seminar.
This book is a great read, I recommend that if what I wrote interests you, buy it. However, you will definitely need much supplementary materials from both liberal and conservative scholars to revise your frame of thought.
So who was the historical Jesus? For Schweitzer, he was an heroic, albeit deluded, messianic prophet dominated by the conviction that he was God's chosen instrument to announce the imminent end of history -- burning with apocalyptic zeal, marching to Jerusalem, confident that he could compel the Kingdom's arrival on earth through a voluntary death. But the anticipated divine intervention failed to occur, and Jesus was crushed by the system he defied, the entire drama ending on the cross. No resurrection.
Even if Schweitzer's portrait of Jesus is a bit extreme, he at least got the basics right -- that is, Jesus as an eschatological prophet -- and he rightly sounded the death knell for the liberal quest of the historical Jesus. And Schweitzer was a true prophet, for there has been a resurgence of the liberal quest, particularly in the work of the notorious Jesus Seminar. Just as the quest of 1778-1901 made Jesus into a liberal German Protestant, so now the Jesus Seminar has made him into a liberal North American humanist, fitting this mold in the guise of a non-eshatological cynic-sage divorced from Judaism. This Jesus is, as Schweitzer could have easily predicted, made over in the image of the Jesus Seminarians.
For more up-to-date works which follow Schweitzer in depicting Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet, see E.P. Sanders' "The Historical Figure of Jesus", Paula Fredriksen's "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews", and Dale Allison's "Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet". Allison's book, in particular, is worth its weight in gold.