Secrets of the Superbosses

What do Ralph Lauren, Larry Ellison, Julian Robertson, Jay Chiat, Bill Walsh, George Lucas, Bob Noyce, Lorne Michaels, and Mary Kay Ash have in common? They didn’t just build organizations; they spotted, trained, and developed a future generation of leaders. They belong in a category beyond superstars called superbosses.

As Sydney Finkelstein explains, when you look at the top people in a given industry, you’ll often find that as many as half of them once worked for the same well-known leader. In professional football, twenty of.....