Review of "Deciding Who Leads" by Joseph Daniel McCool

The book "Deciding who Leads - How Executive Recruiters Drive, Direct & Disrupt the Global Search for Leadership Talent" is one of the very few books written by a Search Consultant on Executive Search. Alas, it doesn't show, and its reading left me unsatisfied and dissapointed. The blurb on the back:

Deciding Who Leads offers a front-row seat from which to witness the high-stakes drama, victories, and missteps that characterize the executive search process amid what has become an intense, truly global competition for leadership talent.

If you take that Hollywood movie like claim at face value, then you're in for some major disappointment.

The main reason is because the book presents a collection of mostly trivial idea's, stiched together into what is supposed to be a unique insight into the "secret" world of Executive Search, and how the invisible executive search profession is "charting the course of global business". Such claims raise high expectations, though the style in which they are delivered should already give one some sense of the hot air the author will be pumping throughout the almost 200 pages.

Contrary to the colorful, blockbuster like claims on the back, the book offers seldom anything more than rehashed, stale truisms about the search profession, setting the tone with the cliche  title of the first chapter: "The Global War for Executive Talent". Oh yeah, don't forget, there is a war out there. I have no doubt McCool loves freedom fries.

One chapter which took my particular interest (and the reason I bought the book) was the one examining the cost of bad executive hire. The cost of a bad executive hire is high, potentially very high, and I will not dispute that. The question is how much a company gets hit through a bad hire. McCool asserts the following:

• Direct costs: 20% of the total cost, equal to 2-3 times the yearly salary of the executive. This includes the cost of his initial hire, compensation, cost of "extraction", cost of replacing the misfit.
• Indirect costs: 80% of the total cost, equal to 8-12 times the yearly salary: disruption of unit performance, loss of unit and leadership productivity, loss of opportunities, management level churn, loss of goodwill.

An argumentation as how exactly these costs are calculated is absent. Nada, zilch. Like most of the book the above is based on a "because I say so" style of assertion, whereas one or more case studies , which could for instance cover a large or small company, verticals such as manufacturing, FMCG, technology or financial services, or companies by geography. Such case studies would have provided far more insight, and make McCool's claims much, much more credible. 

One of the parts I liked the most were the lists of characteristics describing clients  search consultants liked and disliked search consultants (pages 132 and 133) - which McCool took from another consultant (listed in the footnote). Food for thought that not every client matters - though during this current crisis everyone will privately confess we are happy with any client.

My take is that most of the book reads like an elaborate and smooth PR exercise, though some some people will like the light, uncomplicated, fiction like fare presented by the author. It surely does not offer the thoroughness, depth and detail of a Harvard Business School Press publication and the likes. Shurely not folks.