What the CEO Wants You to Know : How Your Company Really Works (book)

Yes, it's a small book already but I thought the author could have got to the points sooner with a little less prose and more advise. I can see that he did a lot of work and is obviously an intelligent person it just as another reviewer put it "the book does not deliver on what the title suggests".
It's worth a read on a long airplane ride but not worth setting your career by.

This is the first book I've picked from the ChangeThis "Personal MBA" list (http://www.changethis.com/17.PersonalMBA) and boy am I disappointed.

I thought this primer-level introduction to business would give me the tools I needed to understand the nuts & bolts of Collins and Lazier's *Running the Small to Mid-Sized Business* but no such luck.

He gives us a taste of the math that is required to understand business, but I guess he's afraid of scaring people off with too much math, because it's glossed over in such a way as to be unusable. It's like sex without penetration.

And right now I'm reading a section where he says, "Obviously, the higher the P-E multiple, the more wealth is created."

By that logic, all those overvalued internet stocks during the dot com bubble created a lot of wealth. And so did Enron.

I hope the other books on the "Personal MBA" list are better than this.

Excellent book. Author presented complex ideas in a simple format.

Good book and straight to the point. Good for strategic thinking and planning of a business. I picked it up with Stop Working by Rohan Hall which was also an excellent book about strategically building a business.

I recommend these books highly.

The most brilliant thing about this extremely slim volume is it's title. Any ambitious person in a corporate setting will want what the book promises. Unfortunately, the promise is not fulfilled.

One problem is the book is most applicable to retail or manufacturing. The central insight of the book deals with inventory turnover. That may be fine for Dell Computers, but CEOs of companies that develop software don't care about inventory, because there is none. The entire service/information economy is more or less ignored.

Overall I found the book interesting and worthwhile. But if you strip away the folksy tales about fruit vendors in the third world and anecdotes about the CEO of Ford, what you have left is a short pamphlet.

I would guess this book contains information my CEO would probably would want me to know. But I am pretty sure my CEO would want me to know a whole lot more than whats in this book.