Compiled by the editors of the Wall Street Journal

Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2002

$14.95, 178 pages

Boss Talk, by the editors of the Wall Street Journal, is a collection of previously published interviews with leading CEOs. The book is organized into seven sections — motivating employees, managing growth, building a brand, learning from the New Economy, "trendspotting," beating the competition, and leading a successful turnaround or transition. Most of the interviews have a useful five-point summary of the key ideas, although there are few revelations.

The value of such a book is that it can convey some of the monomaniacal intensity that the successful chief executives bring to their activities, together with their ability to compress complex ideas into telling points. Thus Jack Welch spends over 50 percent of his time on people issues and grades their performance on a curve that compels managers to distinguish sharply between their top, middle, and bottom performers. John Chambers of Cisco Systems Inc. receives daily reports on customers whose networks are unstable and pays his managers based on customer satisfaction. Kevin Roberts of the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi reminds us that no medium ever replaced another and that the e in e-commerce should stand for emotion, not electronic, because great brands are about relationships, not just information. Tom Freston of MTV Networks describes how it stays abreast of the teenage market with the challenging advice not to follow a generation as it moves on but to focus on the next one. You may not agree that everything in this book is applicable to your own business, but the short, stimulating presentation of these ideas will leave you invigorated.