Quite a rare bunch of the human population are born leaders.  Inspiring their team is an inborn characteristic for these special people.  For the rest of us a little help is needed.  If the neighbor at my apartment was a CEO, I could have socialized with him over a golf match in the Golconda golf club in Hyderabad and got tips on management and leadership.  If the CEO was rather younger, I could have challenged him to a tennis match and made him run corner to corner.  Let me cut to the chase. CEOs are very smart and very busy people. They do not conduct coaching classes here on how to become a CEO (unsure if Arindham Choudhary has come up with that course too).  My point is that, we only get to know about CEOs through press releases, cover stories in newspapers & magazines.

This is where 1000 CEOs takes us up-close and personal with the leaders.  1000 CEOs is not a crash course on how to become a CEO in 30 days.  It’s a subtle index to 1000 of the smartest brains in the corporate world, their strengths, their weaknesses, their best decisions etc.  The aim of this collection is not to bore you with their personal life.  Where did they grow up, when did they have their first crush etc.  This speaks in a crisp language and makes it easy for you to remember the turning points in their lives (maximum one page per CEO).

What makes this book so inspiring is the people on whom this book is based.  For example:

Angela Ahrendts, CEO, Burberry: She is famous for never having taken a day off sick in over 25 years in the business.  Her most famous quote is “I am still as passionate about what I do as the day I started.”

Else you have Indra Nooyi saying “Companies today are bigger than many economies…  If companies don’t do [responsible] things, who is going to?”

The Editor in Chief – Andrew Davidson and the Business Editor Marjan Bolmeijer have organized these CEOs under 10 major headers: Innovators, Start-up Titans, Motivators, Organizers, Strategists, Rebuilders, Value Squeezers, Visionaries, Controversialists, Globalists.

From Steve Jobs to Subroto Roy, you have them all.

–Varun Mannava Gowtham