What the CEO Wants You to Know: How Your Company Really Works »

Ram Charan is a highly sought adviser to CEOs and senior executives in companies ranging from start-ups to the Fortune 500, including GE, Ford, DuPont, EDS, Universal Studios, and Verizon. He is the author of Boards That Work and the coauthor of Every Business Is a Growth Business and E-Board Strategies. Dr. Charan has written numerous articles for Harvard Business Review and other publications, including the Fortune cover story "Why CEOs Fail."He has a D.B.A and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and has taught at Harvard and Northwestern. He won the best teacher award at Northwestern's Kellogg School and was recently elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources.

The best CEOs have a knack for bringing the most complex business down to the fundamentals-the same fundamentals of the family shoe shop. They have business acumen-the ability to focus on the basics and make money for the company.

What the CEO Wants You to Know captures these insights and explains in clear, simple language how to do what great CEOs do instinctively and persistently:

• Understand the basic building blocks of a business and use them to figure out how your company makes money and operates as a total business.
• Decide what to do, despite the clutter of day-to-day business and the complexity of the real world.