A Magazine for Us
Welcome to a magazine designed to get inside your head. We’re a different kind of business publication: We don’t profile companies to tell you whether to buy the stock. We don’t profile companies to give you ideas about where to work. Hell, we don’t profile companies, period — we profile the people who run them. Our audience is as simple as our name — Corporate Leader — and whether you’re a CEO, have an office elsewhere in the C-suite or sit on the board, every element of this magazine is structured to make your life better.

I come at this from two angles. I’ve been a business journalist for 15 years, and by this point, I would hope I can spot noteworthy leadership when I see it. Perhaps more importantly, I’ve spent the past decade running media companies, and I know what I look for when I read articles: lessons I can apply to my company, strategies that will make me smarter, leadership styles I can emulate. All those things are at the core of this magazine.

Corporate Leader’s infrastructure backs that up. Coded toolbars at the top of each page instantly alert you to the subject and the subject matter. Executive Summaries in our C-Suite section enable you to quickly determine if the article warrants a full read. We’ve also included the Back Story behind the products that our editors recommend for your leisure time — because exemplary products, of course, result from exemplary (and emulative) decision-making.

As this magazine belongs to all of us — it’s a forum to share ideas both in print and online (CorporateLeaderDaily.com) — I would greatly appreciate your input, positive or negative; simply e-mail me at rlane@doubledownmedia.com. Great corporate leaders, after all, understand the perpetual need to evolve, and that’s what we intend to do here.

Randall Lane President and Editor-in-Chief

If it takes a thief to a catch one, you’d be wise to follow the counsel of Walter Pavlo Jr. As a finance executive at MCI, Pavlo was responsible for the billing and collection of nearly $2 billion in annual revenue. Starting in March 1996, he orchestrated the theft of $6 million. For the first time, he chronicles his saga — part of one of the largest accounting frauds in history — with an insider’s account (“The Enemy Within,” page 88) that, in the age of Sarbanes-Oxley, will send chills up any public executive’s spine. “Nobody likes to question good news,” says Pavlo, who served two years in prison. “But having a sense of professional skepticism can provide an early warning.” His tips for spotting bad lieutenants could prove lifesaving. Pavlo’s new book, Stolen Without a Gun, written with Forbes senior editor Neil Weinberg, was recently published by Etika Books.

Much of what you’ll read in this issue comes from the mighty hand of Rob Norton, one of America’s top business editors. Before signing on to help launch Corporate Leader, Norton was the executive editor of Fortune and the economics correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. “It was satisfying to produce a magazine that can speak to the highest-level corporate executives in their own language,” Norton says. “There’s no watering-down in Corporate Leader.” A veteran chronicler of pioneering business figures — for publications as varied as the Washington Post and Corporate Board Member — Norton is also an adjunct professor of business and economics reporting at Columbia University’s school of journalism.

When Dan Winters arrived in Red Wing, Wisconsin, to photograph the town’s eponymous shoe factory, he was donning an “old, beat-up pair” of its iconic American work boots. “I’ve worn Red Wings since I was 7,” Winters says. He’s in the minority: Domestic manufacturers produce only 1.5 percent of all footwear sold in the U.S. Such statistics lie at the root of Winters’s photo essay, “Made in America” (page 96), which chronicles some of the stubborn holdouts of America’s manufacturing decline. Winters, one of the country’s top lensmen, has won more than 100 national and international awards shooting for the likes of the New York Times Magazine, Esquire, GQ and Rolling Stone. His advertising clients have included Sony, Bose and Microsoft.