CEO Next Door, The

Drawing on a data-base of over 17,000 leaders, as well as thousands of hours of interviews with CEO candidates, business consultants Elena Botelho and Kim Powell overturn the myths about what it takes to achieve the corner office, and reveal the common attributes and hidden insights to success that have helped over 6 million CEOs land their jobs –and what we can apply to our own careers.

Everything we thought we knew about what it takes to get to the top is wrong. You must graduate from an elite college or business school. In fact, only 7% of the CEOs of today’s companies went to a top school — and 8% didn’t graduate college at all. Given how cuthroat the competition to get to the corner office, you can never suffer a career detour or make a major mistake. In fact, on average, people who have become CEO’s have had five to seven career setbacks on their way to the top.

When most of us think of a CEO, we tend to think of companies in the Fortune 100, or 500, or if we’re being particularly generous, the Fortune 1000. In fact, however, there are over 6 million CEO’s of companies in America today with under 500 employees. And the overwhelming majority of those CEO’s did not go to Harvard, attend Wharton or Stanford Business School, or the University of Chicago. Some are immigrants; many worked their way up through the ranks from entry-level positions. They DO however, share certain attributes, as Botelho and Powell have discoverd over the years from their work with CEOs and by mining their company’s research and data banks. The people who become CEO’s are decisive — they may not always make the best decision, but they make the best decision they can based on the information they have at the time; they are reliable — they deliver exactly what they promised to deliver, on time, without exception.

Author: Elena L. Botelho,Kim R. Powell, Tahl RaZ

ISBN:9780753552193