It's All About Who You Hire, How They Lead...and Other Essential Advice from a Self-Made Leader

With corporations now associated in the public mind primarily with greed and unethical practices, it's more important than ever for leaders to move the focus back onto integrity, honesty, and doing the right thing. Mort Mandel, a CEO whom Peter Drucker esteemed in the same category as Jack Welch and Andy Grove, has spent the past seven decades mixing business and philanthropy, to the great enhancement of both. In this book Mandel shows how leaders can create lives of both meaning and profitability.

• Contains Mort Mandel's fascinating story (including his work with Peter Drucker, and the painful sale of Mandel's company)
• Provides both inspiration and lessons on the leadership skills such as building culture, customer relationships and execution that are necessary to achieve crossover success
• Shows how running a business and a nonprofit made Mandel a better entrepreneur and a self-made billionaire

The book is filled with lessons learned from how Mort Mandel built a $3 billion company from scratch, yet also managed to spend up to a third of his time in the social sector, building and supporting nonprofit organizations.

Morton Mandel is a self-made billionaire, entrepreneur and philanthropist. With his brothers, Jack and Joseph, he cofounded Premier Industrial Corporation in 1940, eventually merging it with Farnell Electronics in a $3 billion transaction. The brothers established the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation, which funds numerous social leadership initiatives all over the world.

Mort was named by Peter Drucker as one of three impressive CEOs alongside Jack Welch and Andy Grove.  He learned how to start and build enduring institutions from the ground up.  His financial success and passion allowed him to partner with non-profits of all kinds with a laser-like focus on developing professional leadership, able to truly transform people’s lives. He has personally founded more than a dozen non-profit organizations.  His deep-seated passion is evident in the mission of his Foundation:  “To invest in people with the values, ability, and passion to change the world.” 

Mort has fine-tuned a set of practices that have been proven to deliver dramatically better results.  In his book, It’s All About Who…, he shows how important it is to find, recruit, and cultivate “A” players for leadership roles.  This can lead to better strategies, better execution, and greater client satisfaction.  Further, he believes that personal values matter – honesty, decency, respect, and generosity are essential elements in a life worth living.

John A. Byrne, the former executive editor of BusinessWeek and editor in chief of Fast Company magazine, is the author or coauthor of ten other business books, including two New York Times best sellers. With legendary General Electric Co. CEO Jack Welch, he wrote Jack: Straight from the Gut, one of the most successful business books in history.