When I first became a CEO, there was almost nowhere to go to learn the job. This was before the internet put everything one search away, and back when the business section of a bookstore was the best resource most of us had for learning leadership.
What you found on those bookshelves fell into two categories. The first was the celebrity CEO memoir, the Lee Iacocca genre, in which a famous executive recounted his career with the benefit of hindsight and a ghostwriter. These books were entertaining, and occasionally wise, but they were stories about one person in one company at one moment. They told you what someone did, not how the job works. The second category was the promotional book: a consultant or academic with one idea about strategy, quality, or culture, stretched to three hundred pages and often sold as a singular solution to a problem in business. Some of those ideas were good. None of them gave a view of the whole CEO job.
What was missing was a holistic account of the chief e…