I was sitting on the tarmac at LaGuardia Airport waiting to take off for Chicago when an RSS feed from the Wall Street Journal interrupted my reverie. “Siemens CEO Kleinfeld Plans to Stand Down.” The article says that Klaus Kleinfeld plans to leave when his contract expires in September after “tense board discussions about whether [...] I heard two very distinct views on how to run a company last week. George David, CEO of United Technologies, and Bill George, former CEO of Medtronic, are lauded as outstanding leaders with amazing records of performance in stock price appreciation and customer satisfaction. Their quite different prescriptions for managers reminded me of the validity [...] I was in Atlanta yesterday at a breakfast event at Emory University. I ran into Chris Cramer, who has recently stepped down as managing editor of CNN International. His first comment to me was, “The shrill tone on cable TV news is out of control. The disgusting Don Imus comment about the Rutgers University women’s [...] I was having a drink last night with Matthew Bishop, US editor of The Economist, whose book on corporate philanthropy is due out next spring. We were discussing the rise in confidence in business and concomitant decline in trust in government seen in the Edelman Trust Barometer. Bishop noted, “Business is the most accountable institution, [...]A Damn Shame
Two (and a Half) Different Prescriptions
Shrill Tone Is Out of Hand
The New Mantra: Lead, Tell, Show