Steve Tappin seemed in ebullient form unlike, according to him, the CEOs from around the world he had recently put under the microscope.

His conclusion in his new book, The Secrets of CEOs, was that two-thirds of them were not up to the job.

During an interview at a Starbucks coffee shop on Haidian Street in Beijing, he made clear that many of them would need much more than a coffee fix to get up to speed.

"I met 150 CEOs around the world, and the big thing that struck me was that two-thirds of them are not capable. They are running companies all around the world and struggling with the job," he said.

Tappin was in China after giving a series of lectures in India. The following night, he was scheduled to speak to a group of CEOs studying for MBAs at the Guanghua School of Management at Peking University.

Over cappuccinos, he said the essential weakness of CEOs was exposed last year when the credit crunch hit and they were left floundering as to what to do.

"I think it manifested itself last year. They didn't know what to do. Many of them tried to lead by top-down processes like cutting budgets. That is fine when you are in a 10-year growth phase, not when all of a sudden your revenues drop 20 percent," he said.

"They thought they could grow forever, and they lost sight of reality, " he said.

Tappin, 43, who speaks with an almost missionary zeal, has always been interested in what makes CEOs tick.

Interviewing CEOs

The book, which he co-authored with British financial journalist Andrew Cave, has taken him around the world, interviewing some of the world's leading CEOs.

Those who have come under his questioning have included: Michael Dell, founder and CEO of computer retailer Dell Inc; James Murdoch, chairman and CEO of media giant News Corp Europe and Asia; Terry Leahy of the Tesco supermarket chain; Martin Sorrell of advertising and marketing company WPP; Wang Jianzhou, chairman of China Mobile, and leaders of seven of the top 10 Indian companies, including Narayana Murthy, chairman of the consulting and IT services company Infosys Technologies. They were among the third who had a proven track record that they were up to the job.

He said the problem with many CEOs is they have no work-life balance.

"They are working six days and even part of the seventh day. So what gives? In a word, it is the ability to recuperate. About 20 percent of them admitted they were personally under stress," Tappin said.

Before he wrote the book, he had done medical tests with some CEOs, including doing a mini electro cardiogram test using five electrodes.

Burning 'very hard'

"What we found was they were burning very hard. Around 85 percent of the time their main emotions were frustration, disappointment, anger and irritation. Their energy levels were low compared to the rest of the population. In fact, they were in the bottom quartile," he said.

Tappin said he believes that Western CEOs could soon have a lot to learn from Chinese and Indian CEOs.

"I think Indian and Chinese CEOs are very mission-driven and are very entrepreneurial. They have an ambition to build a great business. They also tend to have this characteristic of building great teams around them, close-knit groups, which in Chinese terms is similar to having a family around you," he said.

By contrast, many Western CEOs lack big ambitions for their companies and are driven by short-term results, he said.

"Western CEOs are pretty good at delivering short-term results for shareholders, but what they aren't good at is basically having an ambition to create a great business. They aren't naturally innovative," he said.

Tappin began his career at 19 at the UK chemicals conglomerate ICI, where he qualified as a certified accountant.

After earning an MBA degree at Cranfield Management School in the United Kingdom and the University of Washington in the United States, he spent time as a management consultant, first for international business advisers KPMG and then for PA Consulting.

In 2000, he set up his own company, Edengene, to help big corporations build new businesses. One of his bigger successes was helping British Telecommunications set up its subsidiary, BT Broadband.

"The aim was to help them create additional revenue, to look at how they could use existing assets within the business to create new businesses from them," he said.

Three years later he sold one-third of the shares in the business for an undisclosed sum, making him "financially independent" for life, he said.

This financial freedom led him to work on his ideas regarding CEO development.

He set up his own consulting firm, Leaders Reloaded, to provide a coaching service for CEOs.

His skills in this field were recognized by international recruitment consultant Heidrick and Struggles, which made him a managing partner of its global CEO practice.

He left to work on his book last year and he has now set up Xinfu, which he describes as a CEO confidant service. His clients include business leaders from the United Kingdom, China and India.

Coaching

"We tend to meet them on a monthly basis. We spend a lot of time on the initial assessment, and putting together a tailored coaching plan which helps them shift their performance," he said.

Tappin said that performance is a neglected area in management, and there is a need for the commercial world to catch up with sports.

"A tennis player like Andy Murray has Team Murray around him, not just coaching his tennis but also a psychologist, someone advising him on his nutrition and all aspects of his fitness," Tappin said.

But does such an approach have any value in the corporate world? Tappin said he is convinced it does.

"I think it is a very neglected area. Lots of CEOs use marketing consultants to go and analyze marketing trends but don't turn the focus of the scrutiny on themselves, and they are often the key to the organization succeeding or not," Tappin said.

He said CEOs don't always get to the top of their organizations because they are the brightest and most able.

"I don't think there are a lot of high-intellect and expert CEOs. You get them in certain industries such as insurance where people have to have a grasp of the actuarial side. The main quality you need is the ability to lead people. I think that is more important than an exceptional level of IQ," he said.

Tappin said what characterizes many CEOs is often some major reverse early in life, such as the loss of a parent or difficult circumstances. He cited former BP group CEO Baron Browne, whose mother was in Auschwitz, and Martin Sorrell at WPP, whose brother died at birth.

"A lot of current CEOs had a really difficult upbringing, which sort of creates the DNA of a super-achiever," he said.

Developing talent

Tappin said that one of his frustrations with CEOs is the lack of emphasis many of them place on developing talent within their organizations.

"They talk 'talent'. Nearly 70 percent say it is their No 1 priority and say they want to recruit people who are better than them. But in reality, they only allocate about 5 percent of their day into doing anything about it," he said.

One of Tappin's major contentions is that Western companies are locked into autocratic structures.

He said the more modern approach is to think of an organization as a human cell with the CEO at the nucleus and with porous boundaries to other layers of the organization.

With such a structure, the CEO is much more in touch with what is happening in the organization.

He said he believes that Indian and Chinese companies are often more eager to adopt this model than Western companies.

Although the Western businesses model is the one often taught in Asian universities today, there will be more emphasis in the future on Asian ideas about leadership.

"I think in the future you will no longer get this export of Western ideas to Asia. You will have three different approaches to global leadership from the West, from China and from India, and the best will probably be some kind of fusion of all three," Tappin said.

(China Daily 11/23/2009 page12)