How to Lead

Wisdom from the World's Greatest CEOs, Founders, and Game Changers

By: David M. Rubenstein

Narrated by: David M. Rubenstein

Length: 13 hrs and 6 mins

Publisher's Summary

Includes live audio recordings!

The New York Times best seller

Number one Wall Street Journal best seller

The essential leadership playbook. Learn the principles and guiding philosophies of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Warren Buffett, Oprah Winfrey, and many others through illuminating conversations about their remarkable lives and careers.

For the past five years, David M. Rubenstein - author of The American Story, visionary cofounder of The Carlyle Group, and host of The David Rubenstein Show - has spoken with the world’s highest performing leaders about who they are and how they became successful. How to Lead distills these revealing conversations into an indispensable leadership guidebook.

Gain advice and wisdom from CEOs, presidents, founders, and master performers from the worlds of finance (Warren Buffett, Jamie Dimon, Christine Lagarde, Ken Griffin), tech (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, Tim Cook), entertainment (Oprah Winfrey, Lorne Michaels, Renee Fleming, Yo-Yo Ma), sports (Jack Nicklaus, Adam Silver, Coach K, Phil Knight), government (President Bill Clinton, President George W. Bush, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Nancy Pelosi), and many others.

• Jeff Bezos harnesses the power of wandering, discovering that his best decisions have been made with heart and intuition, rather than analysis.
• Richard Branson never goes into a venture looking to make a profit. He aims to make the best in field.
• Phil Knight views Nike as a marketing company whose product is its most important marketing tool.
• Marillyn Hewson, who grew up in a fatherless home with four siblings in Kansas, quickly learned the importance of self-reliance and the value of a dollar.

How to Lead shares the extraordinary stories of these pioneering agents of change. Discover how each luminary got started and how they handle decision making, failure, innovation, change, and crisis. Learn from their decades of experience as pioneers in their field. No two leaders are the same.

©2020 David M. Rubenstein. Interviews in this book originally appeared on The David Rubenstein Show: Peer to Peer Conversations. Used by permission of Bloomberg News. The introduction to the interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci was originally published in USA Today on March 22, 2020. All rights reserved. (P)2020 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

A leadership book devoid of leadership.

This book is a compilation of unstructured interviews lacking any discussion of leadership. I am a student of leadership and leadership principles. Based on the title I expected to have the author discuss the concept of leadership and steps taken by contributors to build teams, to make hard decisions, or to at least provide examples of their leadership within each organization. Instead, the unstructured interviews consisted of rambling stories from people who happen to have been successful in life. There was no guiding mantra or lesson to be taken away and applied to the business world or personal life. If you are considering spending your time on this title for the benefit of yourself or your organization, don't expect any leadership lessons to come from it.

Not remotely about “how to lead;” only about personal success

If you want to learn how to lead, read Brene Brown’s “Dare to Lead” which is about how to develop the behaviors that inspire and influence others. This book captures the individual decisions—driven by luck and insight—that led to personal success. I’d give this book 5 stars if it was titled “How to Succeed.” It contains nothing about how to lead other people.

10% leadership 90% bios

Not a lot of leadership help in this book. Saying 10% of the content is about leadership is really generous. It should be named something else. Most is background and bios of monetarily successful people.

Interesting Interviews

I enjoyed listening to this audiobook, and highly recommend it. It’s more a collection of interesting interviews of high achievers, many of whom are great leaders, more than a study of how to lead. It’s about billionaire interviewing other billionaires and millionaires, with a few observations on leadership.

The conclusion is consistent with other studies of successful people and great leaders. They come from a variety of backgrounds and all have a unique way of leading. Success comes from a combination of luck, hard work, luck, perseverance, luck, leadership, luck, great ideas, luck, risk taking, luck, drive, and luck. There is no secret to success, really.

Excellent

I learned so much and feel inspired by the thoughtful, candid interviews. Thanks for sharing.

LOVED IT.. INTERNET VILLIANS, BECAME LOVEABLE..

I truly loved this book..
And David M. Rubenstein seemed to know most of the intervies personally, and brought the best out in them...
I enjoyed hearing their life stories. And how everyone came from different backgrounds, different classes of wealth, or poverty, and ethnicities.... Some trained for their ultimate positions and some were given the positions by who they had previously worked for, knew, or showed their determination to,.. Most were not formerly trained for their prestigious positions....
The interviews I found fascinating, and interesting.. Great individuals who have been villinized by jealously, clashing personalities, or whatever through our electronic media...
I found them very interesting, charming, funny, and charismatic characters.. I believe I will listen to my favorite interviews again...lolol.. I was disappointed they interviewed two of our former Presidents together in the same interview... It just seemed unfair to both, and almost disrespectful of their time.. President Bill Clinton, and President George Walker Bush...
I felt they had a hard time telling their story, with another President in the room to possibly carry the conversation... I would recommend this to anyone who loves reading or listening to intriguing individuals...

Not enough info about personal experience

I could get all this info on YouTube. I feel like the author wanted to make money during pandemic time and piled up all this info together and created an audio book.
I don't recommend this buy. Don't waste your money or credit

Misleading title

This does not have insights about leadership. This could have been really cool, but it’s not. What a joke.

Excellence in Leadership

Absolutely loved it! The audiobook features the actual interviews from each guest and hearing their words was very inspiring.

Eh

Good start and some good nuggets of info but for the most part very biographical with not much substance. Interesting nonetheless.

Really great

Apart from one chapter (I don't even recall which), which had terrible audio, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. Will probably relisten to it at some point.

Not how to lead

I think it’s a misleading title.

It’s clips of interviews is done over the years with leaders in their field. Semi interesting to listen to some of the people have the odd nugget worth listening to. However the title is how to lead and in most interviews there is no discussion on leadership and it never gets passed a cursory mention in some of the chapters.

Perhaps I should’ve read the description perhaps it’s in there. However if you’re a leader and looking on a book about how to lead and nuggets from other successful people-then this is not it.

Live recordings of interviews!

So pleasantly surprised, that it was not just a recording of a book being read, but instead the live recordings of those interviews.

Fantastic

A well presented book which will is very insightful and fascinating. The recorded interviews make this an excellent book for audio.