A fascinating exploration of the world’s most effective bosses—and
how they motivate, inspire, and enable others to advance their companies
and shape entire industries, by the author of How Smart Executives Fail. A must-read for anyone interested in leadership and building an enduring pipeline of talent.

What
do football coach Bill Walsh, restauranteur Alice Waters, television
executive Lorne Michaels, technol­ogy CEO Larry Ellison, and fashion
pioneer Ralph Lauren have in common? On the surface, not much, other
than consistent success in their fields. But below the surface, they
share a common approach to finding, nurturing, leading, and even letting
go of great people. The way they deal with talent makes them not merely
success stories, not merely organization builders, but what Sydney
Finkelstein calls superbosses.
 
After ten years of
research and more than two hundred interviews, Finkelstein—an acclaimed
professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, speaker, and executive
coach and consultant—discovered that superbosses exist in nearly every
industry. If you study the top fifty leaders in any field, as many as
one-third will have once worked for a superboss.

While
superbosses differ in their personal styles, they all focus on
identifying promising newcomers, inspiring their best work, and
launching them into highly successful careers—while also expanding their
own networks and building stronger companies. Among the practices that
distinguish superbosses:

They Create Master-Apprentice Relationships.

Superbosses customize their coaching to what each protégé really needs,
and also are constant founts of practical wisdom. Advertising legend
Jay Chiat not only worked closely with each of his employees but would
sometimes extend their discussions into the night.
 
They Rely on the Cohort Effect. 
Superbosses strongly encourage collegiality even as they simultaneously drive internal competition. At Lorne Michaels’s Saturday Night Live, writers
and performers are judged by how much of their material actually gets
on the air, but they can’t get anything on the air without the support
of their coworkers.
 
They Say Good-Bye on Good Terms.

Nobody likes it when great employees quit, but super­bosses don’t
respond with anger or resentment. They know that former direct reports
can become highly valuable members of their network, especially as they
rise to major new roles elsewhere. Julian Robertson, the billionaire
hedge fund manager, continued to work with and invest in his former
employees who started their own funds.

By sharing the fascinating
stories of superbosses and their protégés, Finkelstein explores a
phenomenon that never had a name before. And he shows how each of us can
emulate the best tactics of superbosses to create our own powerful
networks of extraordinary talent.