Wharton School

What Does It Take to Achieve Lasting Leadership?
New book from Nightly Business Report and Knowledge@Wharton looks at leadership qualities that enabled 25 CEOs to inspire and transform their companies.

To celebrate Nightly Business Report’s 25th anniversary, Knowledge@Wharton, the online research and business analysis journal of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, worked together with NBR to identify the 25 most influential business leaders of the past quarter century. NBR’s viewers nominated more than 700 business people from around the world, and a panel of Wharton School judges selected the top 25.

Among those 25, which one was the most influential? Find out in LASTING LEADERSHIP: What You Can Learn from the Top 25 Business People of our Times, by Mukul Pandya and Robbie Shell, with additional reporting and writing from Susan Warner, Sandeep Junnarkar, and Jeff Brown (Wharton School Publishing/Pearson, October 2004, $26.95). The book provides readers with an in-depth view of each leader, including insights from the leaders themselves as to why they have achieved success in their respective fields.

The authors devote a chapter to each of eight attributes or qualities that have enabled the 25 individuals to overcome major challenges as well as to nurture their own leadership styles. These include:

  • Identifying and catering to underserved markets
  • Using price to build competitive advantage
  • Enhancing their organization’s brand
  • Truth telling
  • Building a strong corporate culture
  • Managing risk
  • Seeing the invisible; spotting potential winners or trends ahead of their rivals
  • Being fast learners
No one person possesses all eight qualities, but readers will no doubt identify with one or more that, if properly nurtured, can help cultivate more effective leadership. As the authors note, no two leaders are exactly alike: What made Michael Dell such a powerhouse in the computer industry has little to do with the success of Charles Schwab, Warren Buffett or Oprah Winfrey. The corporate culture Herb Kelleher created at Southwest Airlines calls on different skills than those exhibited by Alan Greenspan or Ted Turner. The authors also offer timelines and highlights of the selected leaders’ challenges and accomplishments.

The 25 Most Influential (listed alphabetically):

  1. Mary Kay Ash, founder of Mary Kay Inc.
  2. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com
  3. John Bogle, founder of The Vanguard Group
  4. Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin Group
  5. Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway
  6. James Burke, former CEO of Johnson & Johnson
  7. Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Inc.
  8. Peter Drucker, the educator and author
  9. Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft
  10. William George, former CEO of Medtronic
  11. Louis Gerstner, former CEO of IBM
  12. Alan Greenspan, chairman, US Federal Reserve
  13. Andy Grove, chairman of Intel
  14. Lee Iacocca, former CEO of Chrysler
  15. Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computers
  16. Herb Kelleher, chairman of Southwest Airlines
  17. Peter Lynch, former manager of Fidelity’s Magellan Fund
  18. Charles Schwab, founder of The Charles Schwab Corp.
  19. Frederick Smith, CEO of Federal Express
  20. George Soros, founder and chairman of The Open Society Institute
  21. Ted Turner, founder of CNN
  22. Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart
  23. Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric
  24. Oprah Winfrey, chairman of the Harpo group of companies
  25. Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank
To choose the top 25 from among hundreds of nominees, the Wharton panel searched for business leaders who:
  • created new and profitable ideas
  • affected political, civic, or social change in the business/economic world
  • created new business opportunities or more fully exploited existing ones
  • caused or influenced dramatic change in a company or industry
  • inspired and transformed others
The judges:
  • Michael Useem, director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management
  • Peter Cappelli, director of the Center for Human Resources
  • Raphael (Raffi) Amit, director of the Goergen Entrepreneurial Management Program
  • Barbara Kahn, vice dean of the Wharton undergraduate division
  • Robert E. Mittelstaedt, Jr., former vice dean and director of the Aresty Institute of Executive Education (now dean of the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University)
  • Mukul Pandya, editor/director of Knowledge@Wharton

    About Knowledge@Wharton, Wharton School Publishing, the Wharton School, and Nightly Business Report

    Knowledge@Wharton is a free biweekly online resource that captures knowledge generated at Wharton through such channels as research papers, conferences, books, and interviews with faculty on current business topics, and distributes that knowledge online to a global business audience. The website contains more than 1,500 articles and research papers in its database and more are added every week. Over the past five years, Knowledge@Wharton has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, BusinessWeek, Economist Intelligence Unit, Information Week, and several other publications.

    Wharton School Publishing is dedicated to presenting the world's foremost business thinkers in print, audio and interactive formats. All titles must be approved by a senior Wharton faculty review board to ensure that they are timely, important, conceptually sound, empirically based, and implementable. The editorial focus on applicable knowledge, along with multi-media publishing, enabling readers to gain new insights into the issues shaping the future of business, and plan and take action to achieve their goals. Wharton School Publishing is a partnership between Pearson Education, the world's leading education company, and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

    The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania is recognized around the world for its academic strengths across every major discipline and at every level of business education. Founded in 1881 as the first collegiate business school in the nation, Wharton has approximately 4,600 undergraduate, MBA, and doctoral students, more than 8,000 participants in its executive education programs annually, and an alumni network of more than 80,000 worldwide.

    Nightly Business Report is produced by NBR Enterprises and distributed by American Public Television. It is broadcast by more than 225 public television stations, making it available to 90% of U.S. television households. "Lasting Leadership" is based on Nightly Business Report's Special Edition of January 19, 2004, celebrating NBR's 25th anniversary on public television. To order a DVD of this program, go to nbr.com/store.

    For information on Lasting Leadership, contact: Peter Winicov, 215.746.6471 or winicov@wharton.upenn.edu

    # # #
    Contact Wharton Communications
  © 2004 University of Pennsylvania