What is the main message of The CEO Next Door?

The main message of The CEO Next Door is that great leaders are made, not born.

Who is the author of The CEO Next Door?

The authors of The CEO Next Door are Elena Botelho and Kim Powell.

Management & Leadership

The CEO Next Door Book Summary - The CEO Next Door Book explained in key points

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The CEO Next Door summary

Name: The CEO Next Door
Rating: 4.4 (202 reviews)
Author: Elena Botelho and Kim Powell

Elena Botelho Kim Powell

The Four Behaviors That Transform Ordinary People Into World-Class Leaders

4.4 (202 ratings)

17 mins

Brief summary

The CEO Next Door by Elena Botelho and Kim Powell shares insights gathered from studying thousands of successful CEOs. The book reveals the common traits and habits of top CEOs and provides practical advice for aspiring leaders.

Topics

Leadership Entrepreneurship Success

Table of Contents

The CEO Next Door
Summary of 7 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 7

What’s in it for me? Learn what it takes to be a CEO.

CEOs are often portrayed as highly intelligent people who wear fancy suits and have a real knack for business. However, many of them neither hold a higher-education degree nor come from a wealthy background. In fact, corporate success often has little to do with book smarts or a massive bankroll.

Authors Botelho and Powell ran several extensive studies to pinpoint what is truly needed to become a leader of a successful company. These are skills that anyone can learn, and the steps to acquiring and implementing them are clearly outlined in these blinks. Supported by examples of eminent CEOs across an array of industries, you’ll see that there’s nothing stopping you from becoming the next Elon Musk or Indra Nooyi.

In these blinks, you’ll discover

what percentage of CEOs are introverts;
how a garbageman became CEO of a $9 billion company; and
when it’s OK to ask people about their underwear.

CEOs aren’t born, they’re made.

Many of us believe that CEOs are somehow special and entirely different from the average employee. Furthermore, we believe that wealthy parents or exceptional intelligence is necessary to run a large company. However, the ghSMART project, which the authors were involved in, surveyed over 2,600 CEOs and what they found contradicts these beliefs.

The majority of CEOs are just regular people who have developed leadership qualities over the course of their career.

More than 70 percent of the CEOs surveyed claimed that they had no intention of becoming a CEO when they first started working.

Let’s take Don Slager, for example. At the time of writing, Slager is the CEO of Republic Services, a $9 billion company and one of the top-500 wealthiest companies in the United States as rated by Fortune magazine. He never went to college but was ranked the number one CEO in the United States by the website Glassdoor. In fact, he started out as a garbageman for the company. By working his way up the ranks, Slager eventually became the head of one of the most well-known companies in the American waste-services industry. It was his knowledge of and familiarity with the general public, as well as the insights he’d gained from working in all areas of the company, that made Slager the best candidate for CEO.

What’s more, the survey showed that you don’t need to be a genius to become a CEO.

Indeed, those who put forth complicated ideas or use long words are typically viewed as bad CEOs. Moreover, they’re less likely to be hired at all. To give you some stats – only seven percent of CEOs graduated from an Ivy League school. Though Fortune 500 companies usually have Ivy League graduates among their leaders, the smaller, less-known firms don’t. But Ivy League schools aside, consider this: like Don Slager, eight percent of CEOs have never attended any college, so, clearly, lacking a formal higher-level education is no hindrance.

You also don’t need to be an exceptionally outspoken person to be a CEO. Egoistic people make the worst CEOs since they’re too focused on their individual success. And, in fact, 30 percent of CEOs are introverts.

Make fewer and thus faster decisions.

Previously, we’ve shown that a college degree isn’t necessary to become the CEO of a lucrative company. But being highly intelligent is not a prerequisite either.

In fact, CEOs who have a high IQ typically experience information paralysis. They are required to make important choices every day. There are many different avenues by which to arrive at a decision, such as being thoughtful, impulsive, logical or decisive. Out of these options, high-performing CEOs often opt for decisiveness, meaning the ability to decide quickly and with conviction. Indeed, the authors found in a study that decisiveness made CEOs 12 times more likely to be top performers.

To get favorable results, you need to understand your stakeholders.

As mentioned earlier, a surprisingly large number of CEOs are introverts rather than extroverts. This is because, in order to be an effective CEO, you’ve got to be able to consider other people’s perspectives. Company owners need to understand what motivates customers, board members and stakeholders, which means that CEOs need to listen and have empathy. Introverts tend to be particularly adept at this.

By truly listening to people, you avoid making assumptions, which is important. When it comes to other people’s perspectives and outlooks, you shouldn’t assume you know what they think. Instead, you should show genuine curiosity and pay attention when they’re talking about themselves.

People will rely on a consistent and committed CEO.

If two candidates are competing for a CEO position, the one who appears most reliable will get the job. In fact, CEOs who are known to be reliable are twice as likely to be offered a position than those who don’t have that reputation.

To present yourself as a reliable person, you must always follow through on your commitments.

Avoid mistakes by building repeatable, well-planned systems.

When you’re leading a big organization, it’s almost impossible to micromanage everything. Therefore, you need to implement self-sustaining systems that have easily repeatable steps to ensure employees work efficiently.

To do so, imagine yourself as a conductor of an orchestra.

Forget the past and focus on adapting to future trends.

What do Blockbuster Video and Kodak have in common? Both are businesses that failed because they didn’t adapt to the future.

One important aspect of planning for the future involves making room for new ideas by letting go of old ones.

You need to get noticed to advance to the top.

If you think you’re more important than the company you work for, then the chances you’ll get hired as a CEO are pretty slim. Employers look for team players who will act according to the company’s best interests, rather than those who act out of self-interest.

So how do you show what you’ve got, if you’re not supposed to brag about your talents?

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What is The CEO Next Door about?

The CEO Next Door (2017) takes a look at what separates a good CEO from a great one. Backed up by extensive research headed by the authors, it proposes that ordinary people can become leaders of large, successful companies, and details the steps involved in climbing that corporate ladder.

The CEO Next Door Review

The CEO Next Door (2018) is a comprehensive guide to becoming a successful CEO, based on an in-depth study of over 2,600 leaders. Here's why this book is worth reading:

It offers practical tips and strategies for aspiring CEOs, helping them navigate their way to the top.
By debunking common myths about what it takes to be a CEO, it provides a fresh perspective on leadership and success.
With its insightful stories and interviews with top executives, the book offers valuable lessons and an inside look into the world of CEOs.

Best quote from The CEO Next Door

Top CEOs spend as much as 40 percent of their time hunting future trends.

—Elena Botelho and Kim Powell

Who should read The CEO Next Door?

Anyone with aspirations to become a CEO
Leaders who want to improve their management skills
Entrepreneurs looking for advice on how to run a business

About the Author

Elena Botelho and Kim Powell both have backgrounds in business, which led them to work on ghSMART, the biggest-ever study on the personality and mentality of world business leaders. Botelho and Powell also advise leading CEOs and senior executives.

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