Incisive reading for both women and men about the dynamics of corporate leadership.
A leadership consultant examines business executive Andrea Jung’s tenure as Avon CEO and the lessons her rise to and fall from power offer those seeking to climb the corporate ladder.
Jung had no real desire to become CEO when she joined the venerable but staid Avon cosmetics corporation as a marketing consultant in 1993. But her exotic beauty, intelligence and charisma captivated everyone. So did her innovative, risk-taking style, which almost immediately began yielding profits for Avon. With the help of then-CEO Jim Preston, Jung became head of global marketing for Avon in 1996 and, not long afterward, company president and COO. Three years later, she was named CEO at a time when the company shares had plummeted and corporate takeover rumors abounded. Jung met the challenge by implementing ambitious plans to develop “higher quality…products than local markets could produce [while] also working with local managers [to help] them meet the needs of their customers.” Her visionary but often expensive initiatives fueled unparalleled growth and expansion. When Avon’s fortunes took a downward turn in 2005, she took the unprecedented step of firing herself and rehiring a leaner, meaner Jung. But as former Avon exec Himsel (Leadership Sopranos Style, 2003) notes, the same people-pleasing trait that had helped Jung at the outset of her career at Avon ultimately made her unable to impact corporate culture enough to make it as “accountable and performance-driven as it should have been.” Continued financial losses and scandals—including a Securities and Exchange Commission probe into financial improprieties in the Chinese market—led to her resignation in 2011. With insight and sensitivity, Himsel transforms Jung’s amazing story into a clearsighted study of how personal/professional characteristics, gender and corporate culture can impact the ultimate success or failure of even the most talented CEOs.
Incisive reading for both women and men about the dynamics of corporate leadership.Pub Date: April 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-137-27882-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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