Corporate titans and their feet of clay

The strategic course a CEO adopts could prove to be the right one in the long run. But boards have limited patience. If results are not forthcoming in the short to medium term, they sack the CEO

Crash: Lessons from the entry and exit of CEOs

R Gopalakrishnan

Portfolio Penguin, Rs 499, 280 pages

Many bigwigs in the Indian banking sector have seen their reputations scarred over the past year for transgressions ranging from corruption to dereliction of duty. For ordinary citizens conditioned to regard corporate kingpins as demigods, their fall from grace causes as much wonder as news of their outsized pay packets and glitzy lifestyles. Against this backdrop, R Gopalakrishnan, former executive director at Tata Sons, has penned a timely book, replete with case studies, on why chief executive officers (CEOs), often hired with much fanfare, are shown