High Standards, Hard Choices : A CEO's Journey of Courage, Risk, and Change
Author: Dana G. Mead
List Price: $29.95
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ISBN: 0471296139
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (17 December, 1999)
Sales Rank: 410,345
Average Customer Rating: 1.67 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 1 out of 5
This CEO knows nothing of managing an enterprise
Dana Mead was responsible for one main result relative to TENNECO, Inc. How to mis-manage a large global enterprise, and engage with attorneys to orchestrate multiple company spin-offs in order to reap his own personal financial goals and objectives. During his tenure, he was able to accumulate multi-billion dollar debt for TENNECO, Inc. and pass it on the survivors TENNECO Automotive and TENNECO Packaging (now PACTIV), who are still struggling hard to get out from underneither major senior debt obligations. As the spin-offs occur, he ensured that his own debt obligations to TENNECO, Inc. were forgiven. Read the SEC filings on this.Read his book for good fiction, but do not be fooled by his rhetoric. He is one of the most self-consumming, untrustworthy, con-artist CEOs of our time.
We hope he does not ruin other entities in his travels.
Rating: 1 out of 5
Revisionist History by Spin Doctor
Dana Mead was one of the business leaders of the '90s revolution that sparked the United States' resurgence as the world's largest and most productive economy. In 1992, Mead spearheaded a transformation of Tenneco, one of the nation's most troubled conglomerates. He went on to become a policy shaper and voice of American industry as chairman of the National Association of Manufacturers.High Standards, Hard Choices takes a rare look at the convictions of a man on the front lines during a time when companies were reborn and heroes were made. It documents a series of dramatic events in the widely publicised struggle of Tenneco's Mike Walsh against an aggressive brain cancer. Mead was forced to juggle increasing pressures to keep Tenneco's recovery on course. In this memoir, Mead convincingly captures the hopes, risks and turmoil of Tenneco's frustrating bid to gain new business overseas while conducting an unrelenting battle to change federal policy in Washington, DC.
The essence of a tough-minded, humanitarian brand of leadership makes this book a source of inspiration for readers in all walks of management life.
Dana G. Mead (1936- ) was Chairman and CEO of Tenneco from 1994 to 1999 as well as chairman of the Business Roundtable (1998-99). A retired Army colonel with a doctorate in political science and economics from MIT, Mead served as a White House Fellow in 1970. Thomas C. Hayes is a former award-winning New York Times economics correspondent who worked with Mead as an executive at Tenneco.
Rating: 1 out of 5
And then There Were None
Exactly what company does Dana Mead think he successfully led through the 90's? After spending millions to move the company's headquarter's back to his beloved New England, he presided over a phenominal slide in market capitalization that defied logic and took money from shareholder's pockets. How could a company in consumer products packaging,automotive parts, and energy fail to perform in a record-setting expansion of the US economy? I suppose the title is accurate: Tenneco stock didn't meet the "high standards" of its shareholders, so Mead had to make the "hard choice" of acknowleging his shortcomings and spinning the compaies off, at which point they succeeded once free from his leadership. This is not an example of bold leadership to be emulated; it is an example of revisionist history to be avoided. Anyone considering this book should go to their favorite stock tracking website and look at a five year trend of TEN vs the Dow. Case closed. P.S. The fact that this book is not classified as "fiction" causes me to question the integrity of the Library of Congress' cataloging process.
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