‘The most influential consultant alive.’ Fortune

Have you ever noticed that the best CEOs seem to have a special kind of intelligence, an ability to sense where the opportunities in their industries are and how to take advantage of them? The best have a knack for simplifying the most complex business practices down to the fundamentals – the same fundamentals of the small family business.

In What the CEO Wants You To Know, Ram Charan explains in clear, simple language how to do what great CEOs do instinctively and persistently – understand the basic building blocks of a company and use them to figure out how to make it work as a total business. Being able to decide what to do when, despite the clutter of day-to-day to-do lists and the complexity of the real world, takes the mystery out of business and offers a clear road map of organisational success.

First published in 2001 (with over 300,000 copies sold worldwide) but never before published in the UK, this business classic has been completely rewritten and updated with new stories from today’s market leaders and companies, and the latest insights from the cutting edge of management research.

‘One of the world’s most renowned management consultants and authors.’ Fast Company

 In business, leadership at every level is a requisite for company survival. Yet the leadership pipeline –the internal strategy to grow leaders – in many companies is dry or nonexistent. Drawing on their experiences at many Fortune 500 companies, the authors show how organizations can develop leadership at every level by identifying future leaders, assessing their corporate confidence, planning their development, and measuring their results.

New to this edition is 65 pages of new material to update the model, share new stories and add new advice based on the ten more years of experience. The authors have also added a "Frequently Asked Questions" section to the end of each chapter.

In this book, General Atlantic’s Operating Partner Anish Batlaw and veteran business advisor and New York Times bestselling author Ram Charan, show you how to build and incentivize management teams that can multiply enterprise value several times over in 4-5 years.

How do some companies multiply their market cap several times over? Learning to build a high performing talent engine – today’s strategic imperative!

No matter how high your company’s growth goal is, you’ll get from here to there by learning from this book’s riveting narrative of the high-stakes personnel decisions and bold actions taken by CEOs, investors, and boards who grew six real—and world-class—companies, ranging from ecommerce startups to major corporations like Johnson & Johnson. Told from both authors’ firsthand vantage point inside each company, and from Batlaw’s active role in shaping their outcomes, TALENT offers a rare inside look at how shareholder value is created when CEOs move with speed and accuracy to get the right leadership teams in place.

How can you be sure that your company can grow its value as much as these six companies did? By learning from the versatile and replicable methodology presented in this book, which has worked effectively across geographies, cultures, and sectors. TALENT is the answer. Now is the time.

Amazon’s trillion-dollar success is the envy of everyone, but achievable by anyone.

What has propelled their record streak of growth? Their management system, and it can do the same for you no matter what business you are in or what level.

Learning it is as simple as six building blocks distilled by New York Times bestselling author and global CEO advisor Ram Charan and Julia Yang in The Amazon Management System.

The Ultimate Digital Engine that Powered Amazon’s Unprecedented Growth and Shareholder Value Creation:

Building Block 1: Customer-Obsessed Business Model

Building Block 2: Continuous Bar-Raising Talent Pool

Building Block 3: AI-Powered Data & Metrics System

Building Block 4: Ground-Breaking Invention Machine

Building Block 5: High-Velocity & High-Quality Decision-Making

Building Block 6: A forever Day 1 culture.


From their high-velocity decision-making to their top talent hiring practices, the insider secrets behind Amazon’s success are now within anyone’s grasp, block by block.

Whether you are an established CEO or a recent college grad, this concise and actionable book will help your business win in a new digital era that demands nonstop innovation.

According to business guru Ram Charan, the process of selling is broken. Demand for competitive pricing is ever on the increase, and customers want more than great products at great prices; they want you to know how their business works, so that you can make it work better. It is time for companies to re-think their selling processes, and that's where Charan's concept of Value Creation Selling fits in. It is a new approach that while radical is nonetheless practical and produces stronger customer relationships and long term rewards. VCS will enable you to:Gain a deeper knowledge of your customer's businessUse this knowledge to improve your customer's marginsShow how your product and expertise is a winning combination

Someday, every company will listen more closely to the customer. In the meantime, this eye opening book will show you how to get ahead of the competition.

Long-term value creation—the board's new agenda.

A big shift in public ownership has created a new set of challenges for boards. Index funds managed by firms like Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street represent an emerging class of permanent institutional investors who are focused on creating and preserving long-term corporate value. These investors are stating in no uncertain terms that simply managing for short-term shareholder profit is not acceptable.

Bill McNabb, Ram Charan, and Dennis Carey have been on the front lines of these changes with the investment community, corporate boards, and top-level management teams. Since TSR (total shareholder return) cannot keep the short and long term in balance, the authors argue, boards should focus on a different kind of TSR—talent, strategy, and risk—because decisions and actions around these factors, more than any others, determine whether or not a company creates long-term value. This book redefines the board's agenda and explains how to:

• Build and incentivize the right leadership team
• Help leaders take a longer view and communicate it to investors
• Refresh board composition and create diversity to meet the new challenges
• Keep major risks, such as cyberattacks and sexual harassment allegations, front and center
• Analyze the business through the eyes of a shareholder activist

With the new realities of corporate ownership, boards need to lead for the long term. This authoritative book shows them how.

Set your sights on High-Potential leadership and help your organization thrive

In today’s tumultuous and rapidly evolving business environment, High-Potential leaders are in high demand. Do you possess the relationship skills, strategic vision, innovation, and determination needed to thrive as a high-potential leader in your organization? New York Times bestselling author Ram Charan answers that question and helps you hop on the fast-track to leadership success in this insightful guide.

Traditionally, leaders have risen up through the ranks based on their cognitive abilities, analytical skills, thoroughness, and even perfectionist tendencies, but as modern businesses have moved to a more digitally-driven model, the criteria for leaders has markedly changed. The High-Potential Leader explains the modern business climate while highlighting the critical role relationship building, communication style, engagement, and ability to motivate and bring out the best performance in others play in becoming an impactful leader.

Whether you’re just embarking on your leadership journey or are ready to make the leap to the next leadership level, Charan’s real-world lessons and practical advice will help you discover who you are as a leader, chart your path, accelerate your growth, and ultimately, become the high-potential leader your organization needs to succeed.

Radical Advice for Reinventing Talent--and HR

Most executives today recognize the competitive advantage of human capital, and yet the talent practices their organizations use are stuck in the twentieth century.

Typical talent-planning and HR processes are designed for predictable environments, traditional ways of getting work done, and organizations where "lines and boxes" still define how people are managed. As work and organizations have become more fluid--and business strategy is no longer about planning years ahead but about sensing and seizing new opportunities and adapting to a constantly changing environment--companies must deploy talent in new ways to remain competitive.

Turning conventional views on their heads, talent and leadership experts Ram Charan, Dominic Barton, and Dennis Carey provide leaders with a new and different playbook for acquiring, managing, and deploying talent--for today's agile, digital, analytical, technologically driven strategic environment--and for creating the HR function that business needs. Filled with examples of forward-thinking companies that have adopted radical new approaches to talent (such as ADP, Amgen, BlackRock, Blackstone, Haier, ING, Marsh, Tata Communications, Telenor, and Volvo), as well as the juggernauts and the startups of Silicon Valley, this book shows leaders how to bring the rigor that they apply to financial capital to their human capital--elevating HR to the same level as finance in their organizations.

Providing deep, expert insight and advice for what needs to change and how to change it, this is the definitive book for reimagining and creating a talent-driven organization that wins.

In this ground-breaking new book, Ram Charan, co-author of the bestselling Execution, redefines leadership by focusing on eight specific practical skills that, if mastered, are guaranteed to bring success.

1. Positioning ­­- ­­­formulating a clear central idea that chimes with your customers' desires and allows the business to be profitable.
2. Detecting patterns - recognising key variables that may create barriers to growth.
3. Managing the social system - influencing the workplace environment so that people can pull together and make the right decisions at the right time.
4. Selecting (and deselecting) people - spotting talent, and making the change when the fit isn't right.
5. Leading your management team - trusting, and inspiring, an effective team of managers.
6. Setting goals - deciding what the business can achieve.
7. Setting priorities - assessing the actions that need to be taken in order to meet your goals.
8. Dealing with external parties - making sure that outside power groups beyond your control do not affect your business unduly.