拉里·约翰斯顿
董事长兼首席执行官
Albertsons
博伊西，爱达荷州
执行对业务成功至关重要，这已经不是什么秘密了。但是你怎么做？你怎么教它？两年前，当我加入Albertsons时，该公司只是没有良好的执行过程。我知道我的电气时代的执行方式是什么。
我的高级领导团队所需的教科书？Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done(Crown, 2002). The book fit right into my new role as a CEO in a big turnaround situation. Many people think of execution as detail work, that it’s below the dignity of business leaders. I think that it’s the leader’s most important job.
该书的基本思想之一是面对现实。因此，我把团队放在飞机上，然后我们飞往阿肯色州本顿维尔，在新的沃尔玛邻里市场上度过一整天。那是我们的现实。我们必须学习如何在像沃尔玛这样的大而艰难的竞争对手的市场中成长和繁荣。
I told my team, “Embracing realism is not easy, but it’s absolutely necessary for us to address issues and take aggressive, fast action.” I cited examples. Exiting some of the major markets that we were doing business in and closing more than 400 stores was a tough decision, but the reality was that those stores were a drain on our earnings potential. Cutting 20% of our administrative workforce was another tough decision, but our staffing levels were not competitive — our costs were too high. Giving frank performance reviews is not always pleasant, but some people just don’t measure up.
该书的合着者之一是GE的前同事Larry Bossidy。我们从杰克[韦尔奇]学到的教训推动了我们的领导风格。今天，我们俩都领导着转型计划。
詹姆斯·比灵顿
Librarian
国会图书馆
Washington, DC
如果我不得不从国会图书馆中的1800万本书中挑选一本书，我会说多斯托耶夫斯基的书拥有的most influenced me as a cultural historian. I have spent the past 30 years in Washington, the city of politics and power, and The Possessed is really about both. It is the great political novel of the modern era. It takes you deep into the genesis of the revolutionary mentality. Not of the American kind, but the kind that was eventually realized in the Soviet Union, where ideas that glorified violence and almost depended on violence took possession of what might otherwise be sensible people. There is nothing in the Soviet experience that wasn’t anticipated in the fevered monologues of the characters in拥有的(first published in 1871).
但它预言的不仅仅是这样。最终，这本书涉及对政治目的的系统和故意使用暴力。这是20世纪在黑桃中看到的一个问题：柬埔寨的杀戮场，中国的文化大革命，全球人权的普遍废除。
Most ordinary Americans don’t think about the power of ideas. We’re practical. We’re instinctively skeptical of anybody who is too fanatical. But with that skepticism often comes an inability to understand the ideas that impel people of different political cultures.
作为学者，我已经对影响了各种文化的意识形态强迫进行了很多思考。事实是，我不能说我对现实世界中的任何政治发展感到惊讶或震惊，因为我在大学二年级的大学期间遇到了其中的大多数拥有的.
莫琳·马洪·埃根（Maureen Mahon Egen）
总裁兼首席运营官
AOL时代华纳书籍小组
New York, New York
I first readGone with the Wind（Macmillan，1936年）我11岁。我没动了两天。那是夏天，我只是坐在客厅里的沙发上读书。我不必做家务。我妈妈甚至都没有让我放桌子。这是我第一次被运送到另一个世界。
我从未去过南方。我对内战不太了解。我从来没有读过我的遗产，爱尔兰人。这本书向我介绍了一群生活在我一无所知的时代和地方的角色，并使他们的故事栩栩如生。
Gone with the Windalso got me thinking about books. It hadn’t really dawned on me until then that people wrote books and published them. I never thought I would be a writer, but I realized that you could work with writers. I knew it was a kind of job.
多年后，我重读了随风而逝当我知道我要编辑续集时，斯嘉丽. I didn’t enjoy it as much the second time around, even though we now publish it in paperback. The dialect is painful. So is the vision of slaves. The author was a Southerner, and she wrote from a Southern point of view. If you read it that way, it’s a great portrayal of the South at that time. But when you read it in the context of today’s mores, it’s not — how should I put it? — as comfortable. But, at least for me, it’s also hard to reread a book and get swept up in the emotions of it all over again.
尽管如此，随风而逝让我走上职业赛道。我将其推荐给我的所有侄女和大小组，这三个人中的两个已经写了自己的书。因此，正是下一代成为作家。
鲍勃·纳德利（Bob Nardelli）
President and CEO
家得宝
Atlanta, Georgia
When I became CEO, I reread经验经济（哈佛商学院出版社，1999年）。很早就显而易见的是，将Home Depot送至首批500亿美元，这并不会使它达到接下来的500亿美元。我知道新的竞争领域是客户的经历。
因此，我们尝试了一些商店，并创造了更具吸引力的环境。我们提高了光线以使事物变亮并改善地板覆盖物以获得更大的反射率。我们的迹象更清晰。商店的混乱少。我们的新地毯显示器为客户提供了足够的空间，可以将地毯拉下地毯，并将其放在地板上，以了解其真正的外观和感觉。现在，我们进行夜晚的收到，以便在白天，客户不会与叉车竞争，并且商店员工可以完全专注于创造令人难忘的体验。结果？考虑设备。在我们增强演示文稿的商店中，销售额增长了22％。基本上，我们从没有市场地位到不到12个月的第三名。
We’re also focused on getting customers more engaged. As the book says, move the customer from a passive to an active participant. We recently held the first-ever national Do-It-Herself Workshops, where some 40,000 women learned all kinds of projects — from paving stones to installing low-voltage outdoor lighting.
我们曾经对客户服务进行更定量的视图：您会再次在这里购物吗？您喜欢什么产品？我们位置方便吗？今天，我们正在寻找品牌亲和力。人们想因为经历而来到家得宝？
查克·威廉姆斯
创始人
威廉姆斯·索诺玛
San Francisco, California
You might say that a cookbook is an unusual book to consider really influential. I foundLes Recettes de Mapie（Hachette，1956年）在我的第一次购买旅行中，在巴黎。一定是1959年。我三年前开设了威廉姆斯·索诺玛（Williams-Sonoma），但事情刚刚开始。这本小书成为了我的特殊成分。
It reinforced my idea of opening a French kitchenware shop for the American cook. This was before French cooking took off in the United States, before Julia Child came out with her cookbook. I was drawn to this little book because it was all about simple French cooking, and the presentation itself was simple — bright yellow, colored pictures, under 100 pages. The author, Comtesse Guy de Toulouse-Lautrec, was a big deal, too.
The book inspired me. It became my way of sharing recipes with customers and, by extension, giving them good service. The recipes were simple but unconventional — from a soufflé baked in a grapefruit toporcàl’l'Orange，猪肉脊肉，上面是橙色片和果汁。这本书是法语的，所以我从未在商店里卖掉它，但是我通常在商店柜台上放了它，展示图片和翻译食谱。当顾客前往欧洲时，他们将带着餐馆的食谱和菜单返回商店。为客户做饭也不少见。我邀请他们回家吃晚饭，然后尝试食谱。不久之后，porcàl’l'Orangespread round the dinner-party circuit in the Bay Area.
分享食谱是我发展业务的方式。它自然成长。我已经了解到，如果您喜欢自己的工作，那么世界将爱上您。