Lasting Lessons from the Corner Office: Essential Wisdom from the Twentieth Century's Greatest Entrepreneurs

Lasting Lessons from the Corner Office uncovers the secrets behind the success of the great CEOs through their lives and personal stories. Why did Ray Kroc's plan for McDonald's thrive when all the other burger joints failed? How can we apply his lessons to Krispy Kreme? How did Walt Disney's most dismal day as a young cartoonist radically change his career direction? We learn about their biggest challenges and failures, and how they successfully rode the waves of demographic and technological change. When Estée Lauder was a child in Queens, New York, the average American spent $8 a year on toiletries. How did she spot an opportunity in high-priced cosmetics? Why did she pound on the doors of Saks? How did Thomas Watson, Jr., decide to roll the dice and put all of IBM's chips on computing, when his father thought it could be a losing idea?

Lasting Lessons from the Corner Office not only fascinates with the personal lives of these CEOs, it shows how we can transfer their ideas today to the triumphs and struggles of Sony, Dell, Costco, Carnival Cruises, Time Warner, and numerous other companies trying to figure out how to stay on top, or climb back up. The featured CEOs in this book were not candidates for sainthood. Many of them knew "God" only as a prefix to "damm it." But they were devoted to their businesses, not just to their egos, personal bank accounts, and yachts.

Extraordinarily fresh and deeply thoughtful, Todd G. Buchholz's Lasting Lessons from the Corner Office is a truly enjoyable and fun--yet serious and realistic--look at what we still have to learn and absorb from these former CEOs.

Todd G. Buchholz is a former White House director of economic policy, managing director of the legendary Tiger hedge fund, and winner of Harvard's annual teaching prize in economics. He is the author of New Ideas from Dead Economists and New Ideas from Dead CEOs, and has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time, and Forbes. He regularly appears on PBS, NPR, Fox, and CNBC, and is a co-producer of the Broadway hit Jersey Boys. Buchholz has served as a fellow at Cambridge University and is the inventor of the Math Arrow Matrix. He lives in Southern California.