Get your own CEO Institute Memory Box

CUES member relations director describes all she took home from Wharton this spring.

by. Tammy Douglass

I took a lot of useful things home from CEO Institute I: Strategic Planning this spring. But the size of the experience was so big I had to ship a box of things back to get everything home. Here’s what was in my box (these items are in the photo, too):

• requisite Wharton T-shift and environmentally sound water bottle;
• recommended future reading, including The Art of Woo: Using Persuasion to Sell Your Ideas by G. Richard Shell; The Leadership Moment by Michael Useem; and The Leader’s Checklist, also by Useem and
• my institute binder.

That last item–the leadership binder–is a particularly excellent “go back to it” resource. I’m thumbing through it now, seeing the tabs for each day of the week of our learning, and picking a section of the session to remember.

Ah yes, this was a good part: Consider which of the companies that were prominent in 1910 are still around. (The companies listed include the likes of U.S. Steel.) The short answer is there aren’t very many.

In keeping with this, we talked about what a company has to do to build a sustainable competitive advantage–that will keep them going over time. Some of the key ideas were:

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