Nightly Business Report Presents Lasting Leadership : What You Can Learn from the Top 25 Business People of Our Times

Two of the world's leaders in business knowledge and insight, The Nightly Business Report, and Knowledge@Wharton, come together to select and profile the 25 most influential leaders of the past 25 years. This book will show you exactly how each leader became so influential. Learn how you can discover, use, refine, and nurture your own leadership style, enabling you to gain powerful influence in your own career. You'll gain new insights into familiar faces, including Jack Welch, Lou Gerstner and Bill Gates. But you'll also gain greater appreciation for less heralded individuals, from Mary Kay Ash to Mohammed Yunus, whose 'microlending' revolution is helping millions of poor people around the world transform themselves into entrepreneurs. The full list of names is astonishing, no other book offers this much actionable insight into this many extraordinary business leaders.

Written by Knowledge@Wharton’s Editor Mukul Pandya and Managing Editor Robbie Shell, with additional reporting and writing by Susan Warner, Sandeep Junnarkar, and Jeff Brown.

MUKUL PANDYA is editor and director of Knowledge@Wharton, a web-based journal of research and business analysis published by The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

A winner of four awards for investigative journalism, Mr. Pandya has more than twenty years of experience as a writer and editor. His articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Economist, Time Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and many other publications. He coauthored Knowledge@Wharton on Building Corporate Value. Mr. Pandya has an M.A. in economics from the University of Bombay.

ROBBIE SHELL, the managing editor of Knowledge@Wharton, has worked as a business reporter and editor for national news services, newspapers, and magazines throughout her career.

She has covered both the White House and U.S. Supreme Court and taught journalism at the University of Virginia. Her freelance work most recently appeared in The Wall Street Journal. Robbie Shell is graduate of Princeton University.

 

Introduction Introduction In June 2000, John Bogle, founder and former CEO of the Vanguard Group, spoke about leadership at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. As an avid group of executives listened to the man who popularized the principle of index-based investing--and in the process built the Vanguard Group into a firm managing more than $550 billion in assets--Bogle ended his speech quoting James Norris, a Vanguard manager, who wrote: "While it is revealing to consider...what constitutes a leader, your search for understanding, for some kind of leadership formula, is apt to end in frustration. It is like studying Michelangelo or Shakespeare: You can imitate, emulate, and simulate, but there is simply no connect-the-dots formula to Michelangelo's David or Shakespeare's Hamlet. I suppose, when all is said and done, it really comes down to this: People are leaders because they choose to lead." The heart of leadership is as simple as that: It is a matter of choice and determination. It is equally true, however, that no two leaders are exactly alike. Gandhi and Churchill rallied millions behind them, but not quite in the same way or for the same reasons. In the business world, John Bogle's leadership of Vanguard might have something in common with the way Warren Buffett runs Berkshire Hathaway, but the two also have big differences--although both are involved, broadly, in the "investment" business. Andrew Grove and Bill Gates are chairmen of high-tech companies with commanding positions in their respective markets--but while Gates grew up as the privileged son of a wealthy attorney, Grove spent his early years enduring the rigors of Stalinist Hungary. These vastly different backgrounds are reflected in their approaches to leadership. If this is true, then people who choose and are determined to become influential business leaders can benefit from observing other leaders and using their observations to discover and nurture their own leadership style. The purpose of studying other business leaders is not so much to imitate their qualities as to discover which attributes resonate with one's own and, thus, can be cultivated to further enhance one's leadership skills and capabilities. Leaders are made, not born. Discovering the attributes of lasting leadership can help people increase their impact in their own spheres. Someone who does this might not become another Jack Welch or Mary Kay Ash, but he or she might become a better leader than would otherwise be possible in the absence of this knowledge. Our book,Lasting Leadership: What You Can Learn from the Top 25 Business People of Our Times,is based on that premise. It is the result of collaboration betweenNightly Business Report(NBR), the most-watched daily business program on U.S. television, andKnowledge@Wharton( http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu ), the online research and business analysis journal of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. To celebrate NBR's 25th anniversary in January 2004, Wharton and NBR worked together to identify the 25 most influential business leaders of the past 25 years. NBR's viewers nominated more than 700 business people from around the world, and a panel of six Wharton judges selected the Top 25. The winners are, in alphabetical order, Mary Kay Ash, founder of Mary Kay Inc.; Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com; John Bogle, founder of The Vanguard Group; Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin Group; Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway; James Burke, former CEO of Johnson & Johnson; Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Inc.; Peter Drucker, the educator and author; William Gates, chairman of Microsoft; William George, former CEO of Medtronic; Louis Gerstner, former CE