MDA Leadership Consulting Book Profile 

What the CEO Wants You to Know

Book Author:  Ram Charan
MDA Reviewer:  Peter Germann

When I begin working with a new business leader, one of the first questions I ask him or her is “how does your organization make money?”  After 20 years of consulting, I’m still amazed at how few people actually know how to answer my question.  When I picked up and started reading What the CEO Wants You to Know for the first time, I knew within the first two chapters in that it was going to be a powerful resource for me to share with many of my clients, especially middle managers and supervisors who need to have the business acumen to make decisions that help achieve results. In the book, Charan takes the simple concepts he learned from his family’s fruit business and translates them into time-tested business principles that can be applied every day.

Charan makes the case that all leaders need to have business acumen—the ability to focus on the basics and make money for the company. What the CEO Wants You to Know captures these insights and explains in clear, simple language how to do what great CEOs do instinctively and persistently:

• Understand the basic building blocks of a business and use them to figure out how your company makes money and operates as a total business.
• Decide what to do, despite the clutter of day-to-day business and the complexity of the real world.

Many people spend their whole business career without learning to pull these pieces of the puzzle together. What the CEO Wants You to Know takes the mystery out of business and shows the secrets of success needed by all business leaders.  The book will help you really understand how executives think and will show you that far too few people in organizations actually understand how companies make money.

CEOs do really want you to know their information and apply it every day in your leadership decisions.  Whether you are a CEO or other business leader, MDA can help your organization to develop middle managers who are sophisticated leaders that understand how to use business acumen to translate your strategy into results.