Elizabeth I CEO

How did Elizabeth meet these challenges, managing not only to stay alive and to keep her imperiled nation afloat, but also to win the intense loyalty of her people and to lead England to greatness? Historians and biographers have offered many explanations. Elizabeth, CEO takes a fresh view, exploring issues that are relevant to leaders--especially business leaders--of today.

It describes the political life of Elizabeth I but in a modern context, and links it on to the modern day teachings of Management.

A good value for money publication and is certainly not a "heavy weight" book - easy to understand. I particularly liked the chapter summaries which include a subject lesson.

Go on, but it - you will love it....

Axelrod portrays the Elizabethan period with such rose-coloured glasses that he fails to impart a useful or realistic message here. The book has numerous references to the queen's fiscal management of the country, to the Spanish Armada, to the outpouring of literature of Shakespeare and his fellow masters of the pen, with little bits of wisdom relayed in the process. All well and good.

But in recognising and deriving lessons from the queen's many undoubted successes, he should have been balanced and also discussed where things went wrong. There is scant if any attention paid to Elizabeth's policy in Ireland, which had a particularly bloody legacy and in which England's undertakings gave rise to failure at every turn from the 1570s onward. The consequences of this policy failure are still with us today. Nor is there mention of England's military defeats against Spain after the Armada, which devastated English plans to settle the new world and gain control of trade routes. Nor does Axelrod note the cases of financial mismanagement and corruption that plagued Elizabeth's reign in the late 1500s. And where is this empire he talks about in the book's title, "the leader who built an empire"? Axelrod skips the specifics on this because there was no empire by the time King James I succeeded Elizabeth in the early 1600s. England would not have an empire to speak of for another 150 years.

There is nothing wrong or unexpected about these setbacks in Elizabeth's reign-- she had many successes and, like any monarch, some missteps as well. If one wishes to use such a monarch as an example for a business, it is a disservice to readers to trumpet the successes while ignoring the failures. What business, after all, turns in profitable quarters with every fiscal year and pleases its investors and even competitors with its every move? You'd be hard-pressed to find any such firm gracing the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Real businesses learn from their failures as much as their successes, and Axelrod has denied his readers a valuable example by focussing too much on the latter and too little on the former. This book would be more valuable with a little more depth and a little more perspective in its treatment of its historical subject.

I serve in a leadership/management role currently and much of this book applies univerally to any leadership situation. I have read other books of this type, (Lincoln on Leadership), and have really enjoyed studying past leaders. It also should push current leaders to see how it stacks up to now, and what we need to do better.

I recommend this book. B

Joseph Dworak