Harvard Business Review is the leading destination for smart management thinking. Through its flagship magazine, 11 international licensed editions, books from Harvard Business Review Press, and digital content and tools published on HBR.org, Harvard Business Review provides professionals around the world with rigorous insights and best practices to lead themselves and their organizations more effectively and to make a positive impact.

First Person presents memorable stories of management achievement as told by the people who lived them. With the authority of personal experience, 12 executives narrate their journeys across the perilous landscape of business leadership. In an array of crises - the illness and death of an employee, the turnaround of a failing factory, the demise of a blue-chip industrial giant - the accounts of these managers reveal the flesh-and-blood drama in common business challenges and their uncommon, often courageous, responses. Drawn from a series of acclaimed essays in the Harvard Business Review, the tales told in First Person bear witness to how difficult management really is. Brilliantly analytic and rigorously self-critical, these are not conventional success stories. Some do not have happy endings, and some do not yet have endings at all. But each details the process of struggle and error leading to insight, and together they provide an invaluable guide to the essence of great management.