Leadership--The Inside Story

From the author of the business classic Strategic Learning: How to Be Smarter Than Your Competition and Turn Key Insights into Competitive Advantage Willie Pietersen has practiced and studied leadership as a CEO of multibillion-dollar businesses, as a professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business, and as a consultant to some of the world's biggest and best-known organizations, from Ericsson and Johnson & Johnson to ExxonMobil and the Girl Scouts of America. Now, in Leadership-The Inside Story: Time-Tested Prescriptions for Those Who Seek to Lead, Pietersen offers penetrating, often surprising insights from a lifetime of experience as a business leader. Pietersen shares his unique perspective on leadership as an unending journey of learning, adaptation, and growth, in which vital lessons are waiting to be discovered in every life experience and around every corner. Filled with eye-opening anecdotes, memorable observations, and sage advice drawn from decades of hands-on experience, the book offers a host of evidence-based ideas that can help make anyone a more effective and impactful leader. Here's a sample of the varied insights you'll glean from Leadership-The Inside Story: > How business managers can apply Darwin's theory of evolution to formulate a more successful competitive strategy. > Why asking the wrong question can make a business problem virtually impossible to solve-while asking the right one can unlock it almost instantly. > How leaders can self-sabotage by underestimating the impact of their nonverbal communication. > How some of the world's greatest scientists, artists, and leaders have achieved breakthrough discoveries simply by taking a walk. > The five crucial characteristics of any leader who wants to earn the trust of others. > How living with a pet dog can teach you about the true meaning of transparency-and why it matters. "In these pages," Pietersen writes, "I've tried to offer 'ideas with energy'-concepts and guidelines that pass the test of being useful in practice. They've provided the inspiration for my own philosophy and practice of leadership." Now these ideas with energy will be available to aspiring leaders from every walk of life.

Willie Pietersen was born in East London, South Africa and attended Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, where he earned a BA in law and economics and an LLB in law and was chairman of the Students Representative Council. He was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University in England where he received an MA in jurisprudence. After practicing law, he embarked on an international business career. By 1974, at age 36, Pietersen had become one of the youngest Managing Directors in the history of Unilever. Over a period of twenty years he served as the CEO of multibillion-dollar businesses such as Lever Foods, Seagram USA, Tropicana and Sterling Winthrop's Consumer Health Group. Pietersen has served as a director on several boards including the Institute for the Future (IFTF), a think tank based in Silicon Valley.In 1998, Willie was named Professor of the Practice of Management at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. He specializes in strategy and the leadership of change, and his methods and ideas, especially Strategic Learning, are widely applied within Columbia's executive education programs, and also in numerous corporations.He is the author of two previous books: Reinventing Strategy, published in 2002, introduced the underlying principles and application tools for Strategic Learning. Strategic Learning, March 2010, builds on these ideas and offers more extensive practical guidelines.