A Journey to World-Class Team Leadership: A Life Unimagined

By John A. Leffler

This book is a story about building world-class teams and is based on the authors life, work, and leadership experiences over a forty-plus year career in business. Most of those years were spent with IBM and Apple and spanned over six decades of time, from late 1969, until retiring in 2010. The book captures the real life story and experiences of the author from a young boy growing up in rural Minnesota to a business leader with IBM and Apple. He takes the reader through the personal and business challenges he faced as a manager with IBM and Apple and the ten core beliefs and principles of leadership he learned and practiced in building world-class teams.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Aug 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781504386463

John A. Leffler

The book is my real-life journey that evolved into an amazing career with two great companies—IBM and Apple. The leadership lessons learned in building incredible teams formed my ten core beliefs and principles of what it takes to build world-class teams and what it takes to sustain them.

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Copyright © 2017 John A. Leffler.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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ISBN: 978-1-5043-8647-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-8645-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-8646-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017913074

Balboa Press rev. date: 08/22/2017

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 Beginning My New IBM Career, 1969

Chapter 2 My First Management Positions, 1977

Chapter 3 We Move East, 1980

Chapter 4 A Major Career Shift, 1992

Chapter 5 The Road to Apple, 1995

Chapter 6 Welcome to Apple: The Challenges Ahead

Chapter 7 My Journey to Leadership Felt Complete

Chapter 8 Ten Core Beliefs and Principles of Leadership

Chapter 9 Reflections on the Lessons Learned

Chapter 10 Family and Living in Austin

Dedication

T his book is dedicated to my family, my mentors, and the amazing teams I worked with at IBM and Apple.

Introduction

I ’ll begin this book by building some credibility as I take you through some of my personal history and my forty-plus-year career in business.

Lots of leadership books are written by academics or consultants who bring process and technical expertise to the leadership discussion. I wanted to write a book on leadership that came from the gut, from the real-life experiences over many years that formed my core beliefs and principles on leadership. These beliefs and principles developed and morphed over time to become a baseline for both my leadership style and my ultimate success as a leader. They were formed from real-life experiences making real-life trade-offs.

This book is about the journey a young boy from Owatonna, Minnesota, took to become a world-class leader. It’s about developing and setting in motion a set of characteristics, beliefs, and principles that will help guide people to become successful leaders. It’s based on my work experiences over a forty-plus year career in business, most of those years spent with IBM and Apple, spanning six decades, from late 1969 until I retired in 2010. I saw an amazing amount of change over those years while working with two companies that changed the world of technology.

The one thing that didn’t change over that period of time was how to successfully lead and interact with people in order to achieve world-class results. That’s the basis of this book: as much as things have changed over time, how people learn, excel, and respond to challenges remains very much the same. The challenges and goals and how people go about achieving those goals may change, but the actual environment that a leader creates in order to achieve results remains fairly constant. The purpose of this book is to take you through those principles and beliefs and how they were formed. They helped guide me to produce an environment that led my teams to incredible outcomes over the years.

As I mentioned, I grew up in a small rural town in southern Minnesota by the name of Owatonna. I was the youngest of six children; my dad worked at the local tool company, OTC, and my mom worked part-time at