Taking Advice: How Leaders Get Good Counsel and Use It Wisely.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: BookSHELF - Brief article - Book review

Taking Advice: How Leaders Get Good Counsel and Use It Wisely. By Dan Ciampa. Harvard Business School Press, 199 pages. $26.95.

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Most corporate leaders get regular dollops of advice from a variety of sources but don't make the most of it, argues Dan Ciampa, a longtime consultant to companies and boards on strategy, CEO transition and culture change.

Maximizing the gain from advice isn't easy, of course. Ciampa writes that some of the common problems involve complexity, a leader's own inexperience and "the emotional proximity of the issue at hand." Yet it's in those situations "that a leader's choice and management of advisers can mean the difference between success and failure."

Ciampa's approach here is to weave some 30 or so case studies from his own consulting work into broader chapter themes...