Are you ready to lead? Will you pass the test?

Despite all the effort through the years to understand what it takes to be an effective leader, the challenges of leadership remain enormously difficult and elusive; even today, most CEOs don't last five years in the job. The demands to deliver at a consistently high level can be unforgiving.

The loneliness. The weight of responsibility. The relentless second-guessing and criticism. The pressure to build all-star teams. The 24/7 schedule that requires superhuman stamina. The tough decisions that often leave no one happy. The expectation to always have the right answer when it can be hard just to know the right question.

These challenges are brought into their highest and sharpest relief in the corner office, but they are hardly unique to chief executives. All leaders face their own version of these tests, and the authors draw on the distilled wisdom, stories, and lessons from hundreds of chief executives to show how every aspiring leader can master these challenges and lead like a CEO. These foundational leadership skills will make all aspiring executives more effective in their roles today and lift the trajectory of their careers.

The CEO Test is the authoritative, no-nonsense insider's guide to navigating leadership's toughest challenges, brought to you by authors uniquely qualified to tell the stories. Adam Bryant has conducted in-depth interviews with more than 600 CEOs. Kevin Sharer spent more than two decades as president and then CEO of Amgen, where he led its expansion from $1 billion in annual revenues to nearly $16 billion. He has served on many boards and is a sought-after mentor for CEOs of global companies.

Leadership is getting harder as the speed of disruption across all industries accelerates. The CEO Test will better prepare you to succeed, whether you're a CEO or just setting out to become one.

From medicine and defense to food and cosmetics, biotechnological breakthroughs are creating huge new global market opportunities as well as unprecedented challenges. Companies from mega-pharmaceuticals to infotech giants and biotech start-ups must radically rethink their business models. In the first book on the business of biotechnology, Francoise Simon and Philip Kotler combine their biotechnology and marketing ex-pertise to show managers how to innovate with bionetworks, win customers with biobrands, and create sustainable advantage worldwide. Simon and Kotler explain in clear nontechnical prose how innovation in the new biosector will be driven by a web of cross-industry collaborations, and in particular by three transforming forces: information technology, consumerism, and systems biology. With timely industry cases, the authors demonstrate that by capitalizing on these forces, companies from Hitachi and Siemens to Amgen and Pfizer could become the biotech leaders of the coming decades. The chapters on building and sustaining biobrands are the centerpiece of this indispensable book. Simon and Kotler present a powerful framework that will enable any manager to redefine and transform traditional models into a new branding paradigm: the global "targeted" model as an alternative to the global "mass market" model. The authors illustrate how each of these models has proven successful in launching such blockbuster drugs as Viagra, Lipitor, Rituxan, and Gleevec. Relevant to all industries impacted by biotechnology from consumer goods to industrial products, Building Global Biobrands is essential reading for every manager, marketer, analyst, and consultant who must understand the Biotech Century."