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What the CEO Wants You to Know: Using Business Acumen to Understand How Your Company Really Works

by Ram Charan
Crown Business, 2001

This is another short but powerful book, and it is clearly written by someone immersed in the for profit business world of sales, cash flow, margins, and returns. I particularly recommend this book, however, for leaders and managers in the nonprofit and association community. Don’t be distracted trying to calculate your specific price to earnings ratio (because you don’t have one!), but pay attention to Charan’s guidelines for cutting through the complexity of running an organization and focusing on business priorities and aligning the energy of your people around those priorities. While you don’t have a stock price to look at, you do have cash flow, income, and returns on assets. If you haven’t been paying attention to those business fundamentals, then you probably should. His chapters on ensuring that the whole organization is then aligned around those fundamentals are also helpful. As Charan puts it, “CEOs who deliver results have mastered both the business side and the people side. Unless the CEO masters both parts of the leadership equation, the company cannot continue to deliver results and succeed.”