The universal laws of business success . . . no matter whether you are selling fruit from a stand or running a Fortune 500 company.
Have you ever noticed that the business savvy of the world's best CEOs seems like a kind of street smarts? They sense where the opportunities are and how to take advantage of them. And their companies make money consistently, year after year.
How different is it to run a big company than to sell fruit from a cart or run a small shop in a village? In essence, not very, according to Ram Charan. From his childhood in India, where he worked in his family's shoe shop, to his education at Harvard Business School and his daily work advising many of the world's best CEOs, Ram understands business as few can.
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.
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"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.
Many people spend more than a hundred thousand dollars on an MBA without learning to pull these pieces of the puzzle together. Many others lack a formal business education and feel shut out from the executive suite. What the CEO Wants You to Know takes the mystery out of business and shows the secretsof success used by business legends like Jack Welch of GE.

Ram Charan (born Ramcharan in 1939 in Uttar Pradesh, India) is a business consultant, speaker, and writer.
Charan worked in his family's shoe shop in northern India while growing up. He earned a degree in engineering from Banaras Hindu University and later studied at Harvard Business School, where he was awarded an MBA (1965) and a doctorate (1967).Before becoming a full-time consultant in 1978, he taught at the Harvard Business School, the Kellogg School of Management, and Boston University.
Charan has consulted for many well-known companies such as GE, KLM, and Bank of America. He is the author of various popular books on business, including Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty: The New Rules for Getting the Right Things Done in Difficult Times, Boards That Deliver, What The CEO Wants You To Know, Boards At Work, Every Business Is A Growth Business (with Noel Tichy), Profitable Growth Is Everyone's Business, Confronting Reality,Know How and Execution (with Larry Bossidy and Charles Burck), which was a best-seller.
Ram is a workaholic. He is not married and has no children. At age 67, he recently purchased his first apartment in Dallas, TX. Before this purchase, he did not have a home and spent every night in a hotel room or at an associate's residence. Regardless of his location, his assistants in Dallas send him new clothes via courier and he returns his dirty laundry to them.
Charan was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources in 2000 and named a Distinguished Fellow in 2005. He is also a director of Austin Industries.