WHAT do superb business leaders really do? How do they conduct themselves as they go about the act of managing successful businesses?
It was Professor Jeffery Pfeffer who wrote that biographies of business leaders should come with a health warning: Reading this could be hazardous to your professional health!
Most of these leaders are great self-presenters and being in power now, they are able to rewrite history. Their retelling of their spectacular careers is all too often an airbrushed account of events.
How refreshing to read Bryant's Corner Office, a collection of keen insights on important issues to anyone in a leadership position. It is the result of 70 interviews with successful American CEOs on how they go about their business.
It covers a wide range of issues of concern to us all, from how to choose good people to how to conduct good meetings. It has a rawness that comes from frank conversations and the practicality of the advice of real people who have been there, and done it.
Who would you promote? You have a group a group of 35-year-old middle managers, all smart, all collegial, and all hardworking. When asked this question, the general opinion seemed to cluster around five attributes, none of which is genetic.
They are passionate curiosity, battle-hardened confidence, "team smarts", a simple mindset and fearlessness.
From the public interviews with business leaders we hear on radio, television and newspapers it would be hard to conclude that they have passionate curiosity; one is more likely to conclude that they have all the answers.
The public persona portrayed in the five-minute interview is only for show; what the CEOs Bryant interviewed value in others and exhibited themselves was quite the opposite. They had an infectious sense of fascination with everything around them, and many described themselves as students of human behaviour.
It wasn't the smartest or the best educated that they look for in future leaders; it is this quality of passionate curiosity.
Andrew Cosslett of the InterContinental Hotel group observed at an off-site he held with his top team that nine of the 10 of them had hard backgrounds, and had endured difficulties that had impacted them profoundly.
The importance of failureThis theme of battle-hardened confidence as an important indicator of quality future leadership was echoed by most of the CEOs.
The tough circumstances ranged from overcoming dyslexia in an age when it was not understood, as in the case of Cisco CEO John Chambers, the financial poverty of Xerox CEO Ursula Burns, or Carol Bartz' experience of being orphaned at eight and being taught to look after herself by her grandmother.
This raises the question of why so many people skip the two years in their CV when they started their own business with friends and family's money and lost it all (and had to spend the next five years paying them all back).
The most thoughtful interviewing CEOs would be far more impressed by how you deal with failure than that you "took two years off". After all, you will definitely fail again at something important in your career - everyone does.
We all work with others whether we define this relationship as a formal team or not, making "team smarts" an essential leadership skill.
Teams are never built through team building exercises; rather they are built on one-on-one interactions. In this regard Mitt Romney (presidential hopeful and ex-Bain executive) told Bryant that in every interaction you either gain or lose share, so every interaction needs to be treated as a precious moment.
Back to the question of selection: it's the manager who tells you she has good people, and takes them all with her when she is called up at the annual award ceremony, that you would select.
It is most probably because the CEO's job is largely based on simplifying the complex that so much emphasis was given to the "simple mindset" as a promotion criterion.
Greg Brenneman of CCMP Capital says he is always listening for the applicant's understanding of the two or three levers that can turn a company around. James Schiro of Zurich Financial Services says he wants three slides and three points in presentation.
Teresa Taylor of Quest Communications exhorts people to be brief, be bright and be gone.
The last quality the CEOs look for is fearlessness, and they talk of executives and staff who are fearless with reverence.
Gary McCullough of Career Education Corporation contends that if you don't have some degree of fearlessness, leadership of an organisation is not the job for you.
There is always pressure to make decisions with insufficient data and this, he contends, is the great surprise awaiting the new leader.
Steve Hannah of the online newspaper The Onion says he builds his fearlessness by daily saying yes to what he is uncomfortable doing or what is difficult to do.
The book is full of insights such as these, as well as examples of good practice.
I cannot think of any book I could better recommend to anyone in the top job, or aspiring to be there. It is so refreshingly different to the polished biographies and the plethora of books on management theory and practice.
Readability Light -+--- Serious
Insights High +---- Low
Practical High -+--- Low
*Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy.