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IF YOU are a new CEO and your company had ten thousand dollars to spare, you could think of attending a course that runs every six months.

Called CEO Academy, it is a `boot camp' that offers the participants "unvarnished advice and invaluable lessons from an all-star team of veteran CEOs about how to get the results they were hired to achieve."

Dennis C. Carey and Marie-Caroline Von Weichs present the core of the top-level training in their book How to Run a company, from Crown Business (www.crownbusiness.com).

"One of the first things CEOs should realise is how much they have to learn," writes Larry Bossidy in his foreword. "Gone are the days when the CEO's role was a form of genteel stewardship: quarterly board meetings, international travel, and golf," write the authors in the intro.

"What a CEO must do is often unglamorous, time-consuming, and professionally difficult."

CEOs can be classified into two, the turnaround ones and the non-turnarounds. While the latter enjoys the comfort of time, a CEO entrusted with turnaround work must remember that everything has to be done quickly.

"Time is of the essence — the essential elements have to be in place in twelve months to restore confidence," writes John Dasburg in chapter 2. "When a CEO trying to lead a turnaround gets a late-night call at home from a young executive convinced of an idea, it makes sense to take the time to listen."

What should a leader do when markets disappear? This question confronts readers in chapter 4.

Mike Armstrong has this to say: "When change outside the company moves at a faster pace than change inside the company, the end is near... To transform, you need to develop a strategy that is market-driven."

The oldest business value is to know the customer and the market. What is needed, therefore, is "a deliberate balanced determination to deal with the reality before it deals with you."

Don't take the board for granted, advices the book. "Successful board meetings do not just happen," cautions Stephen P. Kaufman. "CEOs should prepare for each board meeting as they would for a major-customer sales pitch."

Also, it is important to maintain contact with the board members on a regular, ongoing basis between meetings. He also explodes the misconception that CEOs need to serve as exclusive liaison between the board and the senior management team.

"It is the CEO's responsibility to facilitate regular contact between board members and senior managers."

How can one determine if a board is effective? Nell Minow has the answer in a chapter titled "keeping management in check". Governance is again the topic that Ira M. Millstein discusses: Law had to be rewritten when many directors forgot that they were supposed to be system's primary gatekeepers. "Once people finish criticising a CEO, they turn to the board and ask: Where were you?"

How does a CEO measure success? Josh Weston suggests that the CEO has to be deeply involved in designing the measurement systems, rather than leave the job to the CFO or CIO. "Understanding the difference between data and new knowledge — separating the strategic wheat from the statistical chaff — is one of the most important challenges facing any company."

Business editor of The Economist, Matthew Bishop, pens the penultimate chapter, "Getting fair news coverage". He advises CEOs to be less defensive and more cordial with journalists. "Whatever one's reasons for talking to the news media, there are good ways and bad ways of going about it. Too often, executives believe they need an array of manoeuvres to `deal' with the press — steps that often backfire."

Last come ethical dilemmas, the conscience-pricks that are tough to escape from.

The problem, as Joseph L. Badaracco Jr. explains, is that a choice has to be made not so much between right and wrong, but between right and right, where you can make a moral case for each side.

A book to keep by your side when running your company.

ManageMentor@hotmail.com

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