• It has become something of a taboo in our society to say you don't want to be a leader — especially if you are one. Richard Hytner, a former CEO at the global advertising giant Saatchi & Saatchi, experienced it firsthand and is trying to break that stigma.- Lillian Cunningham, Editor, On Leadership, The Washington Post
  • Hytner notes that talent development, for example, is crucial to companies now, so the lack of a great track record for hiring, inspiring, and keeping star employees sometimes trips up aspiring CEOs.- Anne Fisher, Fortune Magazine
  • He argues convincingly that a great team of a chief executive and a number two is a more successful proposition than a solitary leader. Mr Hytner describes the various types of consiglieri – lodestones, educators, anchors and deliverers, according to his segmentation.- Luke Johnson, Financial Times
  • Richard Hytner, deputy chairman of London-based advertising giant Saatchi & Saatchi, thinks corporate understudies are too often overlooked. He’s set out to burnish the reputation of the second-in-command...- Adam Auriemma, the Wall Street Journal
  • It’s a trove of advice about how to be a great deputy and principal adviser, a calling that has brought out the best in people as varied and admirable as Warren Buffett’s Charlie Munger, Anna Wintour’s Grace Coddington, Abraham Lincoln’s William Seward, and Henry VIII’s Thomas Cromwell.- Frederick E. Allen, Forbes

Media Article

Dreamers, Doers, and Disruptors

Dreamers, Doers, and Disruptors

“Under the right leadership, business can be an engine for responsible growth, a force for economic, environmental, and social good and a nurturer of cultures in which people can realize their own dreams,” says Richard Hytner, Worldwide Deputy Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi and author of Consiglieri: Leading from the Shadows in the pages of the September-October 2015 edition of The Smart Manager.

India’s first management magazine is treated to six profound insights from Hytner, who is also Adjunct Professor of Marketing at the London Business School. Among them, how key executives must lead with one eye on longevity. “A leader’s responsibility is to ensure the organization thrives in perpetuity,” says Hytner, “so outlining a dream for it that will outlive that leader, setting ambitious challenges over a 3-5 year time frame.”

Hytner, who believers that “leaders need to be dreamers as well as doers” proscribes that “to lead in today’s volatile and often chaotic context, one needs to have an appetite and aptitude for convincing decision-making, a willingness to act at lightning speed, and a massive dose of emotional intelligence.” The executive, author, and academic also gives his prediction for the most impactful business disruption in the coming years—and it is not the tech-based answer many might suspect. “A commitment to deliver irresistible and intimate personal service,” Hytner believes, “will disrupt many of today’s flash-in-the-pan disrupters.”

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