New Book In Their Time Presents Exhaustive Study of Most Influential American Business Leaders of the 20th Century

For Immediate Release: September 23, 2005
Contact: Kerry Parke, kparke@hbs.edu, (617) 495-6931

New Book In Their Time Presents Exhaustive Study of Most Influential
American Business Leaders of the 20th Century

BOSTON -- Business leaders—whether legends of the last century or trailblazers of the current one—do not operate in a vacuum. In any era, executives lead within environments that are constantly reconfigured by contextual factors—political, regulatory, social, and others—that breed both obstacles and opportunities. In Their Time, a new book from Harvard Business School Press, looks at the 20th century’s great leaders most adept at exploiting the opportunities of their times and comments on the lessons their legacies hold for the study and practice of leadership today.

After four years of research focusing on 1,000 business visionaries, Harvard Business School Professor Nitin Nohria and Senior Lecturer Anthony J. Mayo, who also serves as Executive Director of the School’s Leadership Initiative, present a canon of business leaders, including a listing of the century’s top 100, from Wal-Mart’s Samuel Walton (#1) to the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham (#52) to Coca-Cola’s Roberto Goizueta (#100).

The authors’ exhaustive study also yielded a critical insight: the role of “contextual intelligence” – that is, leaders’ ability to “read” the times in which they live and exploit the opportunities those times present to create or dramatically improve successful organizations or turn around failing ones. According to the researchers, contextual intelligence goes beyond personality traits, industry smarts, and emotional intelligence to include an ability to manage a confluence of external factors in ways that benefit organizations.

Taking the reader decade by decade through the 20th century, the authors bring great leaders—both well-known legends and unsung heroes—of each era to life through a series of concise profiles. Mayo and Nohria’s research reveals that these individuals all created their legacy through one of three leadership archetypes:

Entrepreneurs: Creators of new enterprises—rogue trailblazers who broke molds, took risks, and overcame seemingly insurmountable odds to launch something completely new.

Managers: Business heroes who made their enterprises thrive through discipline, structure, and organization. Managers deeply understood the landscape in which they operated and took advantage of the contextual factors at play to shape and grow existing businesses.

Leaders: Change agents who saw possibilities and opportunities in businesses that others had abandoned. They reinvented, reinvigorated, and reengineered organizations, often giving them a new purpose.

Each story details how major contextual factors, including government intervention, social customs, global affairs, technological innovations, labor practices, and demographics, had an impact on each leader’s path to success—and how the response of these executives to these factors forged and cemented their legacy.

In Their Time is available for purchase online.