Great Minds of Business: Companion to the Public Television Series

Perhaps you saw one or more of the programs in the PBS series. If so, then you will especially want to have a copy of the interviews on which that excellent series was based. If you saw none of the programs, here is the "companion" to them. The executives interviewed:Andrew Grove (Chairman and CEO, Intel Corporation)Fred Smith (Founder and CEO, Federal Express Corporation)Peter Lynch (Former Manager, Fidelity Magellan Fund)Pleasant Rowland (Founder and President, Pleasant Company) Paul Volcker (Former Chairman of the Federal Reserve System)Gretchen Morgenson has done a skillful job of assembling and editing the material produced by the five interviews. What I am especially pleased about is that the tone of each is informal but the responses to questions are crisp and insightful. The questions asked are probably the same ones you would ask if you could sit down with each of the five, one-on-one. For example, here is a brief excerpt from the Smith interview:Q: Can that view or perspective [ie one which differs from traditional wisdom] be learned or can it be taught? Or is this something you think you are born with?A: I think there's a lot of luck and I think it's probably intuitive that's mostly there to begin with. I do think that you can teach people to think in those [non-traditional] channels, however. One of my favorite terms is "Kaleidoscope Thinking," which I believe was coined by the former editor of the Harvard Business Review, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, and what she was trying to get across with that phrase is of you have a business problem and you turn the kaleidoscope a it over, then sometimes perhaps you'll see it in a slightly different form than you had seen it traditionally....That I think you can learn. And whether you're interested in doing it, that's something else. "Kaleidoscope Thinking" helped Fred Smith to conceive of what eventually became Federal Express. The same thinking process also helped him and his associates to make that concept a reality.I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants the next best thing to having a one-on-one conversation with each of five of the greatest business thinkers in the late-20th century. You may also wish to obtain copies of the video and/or audio cassettes.