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The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs And Their Radically Rational Blueprint For Success (2012)

by William N. Thorndike(Favorite Author)

4.23 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1422162672 (ISBN13: 9781422162675)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Harvard Business Review Press

review 1: If you want to run your own business, be a CEO, or get some ideas of what you should look for in CEOs of companies you want to invest in, you should read this book.The eight CEOs Thorndike profiles all excelled in capital allocation, i.e., they knew what to do with the money their companies had.Sounds simple enough, right? There's no simple template, however, as different circumstances yield different best moves.He compares each CEO's returns to the results of his/her peers as well as the S&P 500 during their respective reigns. The CEOs all beat their peers by a wide margin and trounced the S&P 500.Those are great skills to have and understand. This book will give you a leg up.
review 2: This book is a must-read for anyone who is interested in value investing. ... moreThe stile is light and easy to follow, it is broken into 9 sections - 8 for each CEO described and 1 for conclusions.There are several conclusions that the author and his research associates draw from their extensive research into CEO track records:1) Most CEOs spend their time in meetings focusing on PR, marketing and communicating with Wall Street. They rely on investment bankers, consultants and lawyers for advise and often have a large team at corporate headquarters. Most CEOs don't deliver much value for shareholders2) The 8 CEOs described in this book (who have been highly successful when measured by the returns they generated for shareholders) focus their time on capital allocation and strategy while delegating the upper management of operations almost entirely to a superior COO and decentralizing decision making down the organizationThe main value added by the authors is on the one hand identifying the 8 CEOs who have delivered abnormal ROE over extended periods of time compared to peers and on the other hand drawing conclusions about the similarities between them. In conclusion, the authors note the CEO's styles, even though they operated in different circumstances, time periods and industries, were remarkably similar. The only reason this book does not qualify for 5 starts in my opinion is that it is biased toward CEOs of companies who operated in the US in the second part of the 20th century mostly in capital intensive industries. While understandable given the availability of data to research, in a way this limits the applicability of its conclusions to the data pool which was studied. For example, it is possible that a CEO of a Russian, Chinese or Israeli company has achieved returns just as high for a comparable period but the authors did not have the data to analyze their track records and thus could not describe their style. It is also possible, that in 10-20 years the returns of Google under Larry Page will have compounded at the high teens for several decades due to Page's approach of the CEO as a CTO and his emphasis on innovation as the lead driver of company value. less

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