We live in a world where women make up half of the population, but only 5% of Fortune 500 CEOs. While the wage gap is slowly closing, studies show we will not reach gender pay equity until 2053. As women enter the business world in bigger numbers, Hollywood lags behind in featuring women in important roles. We can all agree on one thing: to change this, we need more women in leadership positions. In my short career, I have served many CEOs, mostly as a Chief of Staff. I have learned how to navigate pervasive gender stereotypes and build valuable technical skills and personal traits. In this book, I will share the most important lessons with you - the ones that pertain to creating future CEOs. For those of you who have considered aiming for the role, I am here to provide you with advanced career advice on how to get to the top. For those of you who have not yet decided what you'd like to be, I am here to convince you: YOU are built to be CEO.

Publisher Description

Named to the longlist for the 2021 Outstanding Works of Literature (OWL) Award in the Leadership category Are you ready to lead? Will you pass the test? Despite all the effort through the years to understand what it takes to be an effective leader, the challenges of leadership remain enormously difficult and elusive; even today, most CEOs don't last five years in the job. The demands to deliver at a consistently high level can be unforgiving. The loneliness. The weight of responsibility. The relentless second-guessing and criticism. The pressure to build all-star teams. The 24/7 schedule that requires superhuman stamina. The tough decisions that often leave no one happy. The expectation to always have the right answer when it can be hard just to know the right question. These challenges are brought into their highest and sharpest relief in the corner office, but they are hardly unique to chief executives. All leaders face their own version of these tests, and the authors draw on the distilled wisdom, stories, and lessons from hundreds of chief executives to show how every aspiring leader can master these challenges and lead like a CEO. These foundational leadership skills will make all aspiring executives more effective in their roles today and lift the trajectory of their careers. The CEO Test is the authoritative, no-nonsense insider's guide to navigating leadership's toughest challenges, brought to you by authors uniquely qualified to tell the stories. Adam Bryant has conducted in-depth interviews with more than 600 CEOs. Kevin Sharer spent more than two decades as president and then CEO of Amgen, where he led its expansion from $1 billion in annual revenues to nearly $16 billion. He has served on many boards and is a sought-after mentor for CEOs of global companies. Leadership is getting harder as the speed of disruption across all industries accelerates. The CEO Test will better prepare you to succeed, whether you're a CEO or just setting out to become one.

One of the greatest entrepreneurial success stories of the past twenty years When a friend told Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank that “you’ve just been hit in the ass by a golden horseshoe,” they thought he was crazy. After all, both had just been fired. What the friend, Ken Langone, meant was that they now had the opportunity to create the kind of wide-open warehouse store that would help spark a consumer revolution through low prices, excellent customer service, and wide availability of products. Built from Scratch is the story of how two incredibly determined and creative people—and their associates—built a business from nothing to 761 stores and $30 billion in sales in a mere twenty years. Built from Scratch tells many colorful stories associated with The Home Depot’s founding and meteoric rise; shows that a company can be a tough, growth-oriented competitor and still maintain a high sense of responsibility to the community; and provides great lessons useful to people in any business, from start-ups to the Fortune 500.

There are many books on strategy, but very few focus on helping CEOs fulfill their role in leading strategy in their organization. The CEO's Strategy Handbook will give CEOs and senior executives provocative insights and pragmatic advice to setting strategy, leading the strategy process, and turning winning strategies into great results. The term strategy has, with the help of consultants and academics, developed a mystique that makes it sound difficult, complicated and only for people with an IQ greater than 150. Stuart Cross smashes through this misconception, showing CEOs that this critical element in improving the performance of their business is a straightforward--and even enjoyable--process that they can feel confident in mastering. The fundamentals to great strategy and effective implementation remain the same. Setting a clear direction, rigorously identifying and pursuing opportunities where the organization has competitive advantages, combined with an ability to make trade-offs, focus on priorities, communicate the bigger picture and drive accountabilities are the ways in which the CEO can make a strategy come to life and deliver dramatic and sustainable success. This book shows CEOs how they can make this happen in their own organization. It includes case studies, self-tests, interviews with leading CEOs, charts, frameworks and action plans to bring the ideas alive for the readers.

Get tested and proven advice on how to navigate risk and succeed in all phases of business ownership from a successful entrepreneur who turned a small startup into a billion-dollar company. Self-made billionaire and Paychex founder Tom Golisano understands the fears, risks, and challenges small-business owners face every day. He has launched and grown his own highly successful business and mentored dozens of entrepreneurs, helping them build their own fruitful companies. Golisano knows how nervous aspiring business owners are about the risks of entrepreneurship. Now, he’s sharing the startup-to-exit secrets to success and how he turned $3,000 into $28 billion dollars. Built, Not Born shows you: How going against the grain can be a great strategy for finding business opportunities and why it pays to question conventional wisdom. Why the pregnant pause can be an effective weapon in negotiations and when interviewing potential employees. Why a prenuptial or even a postnuptial agreement is critical to any business owner. What potential buyers and funding sources look for, and the best way to present a business plan. And finally, the key growth and leadership strategies that have helped Paychex sustain its incredible level of growth and profitability. Built, Not Born provides a direct and practical approach on how to overcome everyday challenges. This essential handbook is a key resource for current and aspiring entrepreneurs on how to start, grow, and operate a successful business.

Henri Termeer was one of the first of a pioneering group of business executives who built a disparate group of fledgling companies into a biotech industry that has driven decades of therapeutic innovation. During a 28-year career at Genzyme, including 26 years as CEO, he created a process of drug development that for the first time was patient-centered. He also helped forge biotech's public policy agenda and inspired a generation of entrepreneurs to take on large and important challenges. An extraordinary number of today's biotech leaders were directly mentored by Termeer. His own leadership was iconoclastic: He broke rules and took risks, setting ambitious goals and finding novel ways to reach them. In doing so he transformed an industry and brought hope to patients with a range of diseases previously deemed too rare to justify the investment needed to support the development of specific therapies. In Conscience and Courage, John Hawkins, an insightful analyst of healthcare leaders, reveals the philosophy, principles, methods, and habits of a prominent and successful CEO who defied convention to create an investor-owned global enterprise that put people before profits and improved the lives of thousands of forgotten patients.