Jeffrey A. Krames

Jeffrey A. Krames is an American author and the former editorial director of Portfolio, the business book imprint of The Penguin Group [the second largest trade publisher in the world]. He is the former head of the trade division at McGraw-Hill, one of the United States' largest publishing firms.

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As former Vice President and Publisher of McGraw-Hill's trade business books division, Jeffrey Krames has personally edited and published more than 275 business books, including many award-winning, best-selling titles on business luminaries that include Jack Welch, Michael Ovitz, Ross Perot, William Paley, Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Herb Kelleher, and Lou Gerstner among others. Recently, Krames published seven of the top 35 best business books of the year as determined by Library Journal.

Krames has written five books with three of them focusing on former General Electric CEO, Jack Welch.^[1] Krames writes extensively on leadership and CEOs, and has written an account of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's leadership style entitled, The Rumsfeld Way: The Leadership Wisdom of a Battle-Hardened Maverick. Of his latest book, Jack Welch and the 4E's of Leadership, publishing magazine Kirkus said it was "destined to become a leadership classic." His latest book is Inside Drucker's Brain, published by Portfolio in October 2008. Aside from his book publications, he also has written for a variety of newspapers including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, and has been quoted in Time Magazine, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, Publishers Weekly, etc.

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Krames was born and raised in New York City and attended the Bronx High School of Science before going on to college in upstate New York at age 16. After graduating magna cum laude from SUNY Albany he joined publisher Prentice-Hall as a sales representative in the midwest region. After being promoted to marketing manager in 1984, Krames relocated to the New York area before being promoted to acquisitions editor in 1985. In that position he spearheaded the absorption of the Reston business book line into the Prentice-Hall publishing program. After two additional promotions, Krames left Prentice-Hall, which had now been acquired by Simon & Schuster to join publisher Dow Jones-Irwin in 1988, which at the time was still owned by Dow Jones & Co. In 1996 the McGraw-Hill Companies acquired all of Richard D. Irwin, which included the trade business book imprint Irwin Professional Publishing (the company had been sold to Times Mirror and had changed its name). At McGraw-Hill Mr. Krames served in a variety of positions, including Publisher of Investing & Finance before being promoted to Publisher of the Business Book division of the Professional Book Group. In 2006 he left McGraw-Hill to join the Penguin Group as Editorial Director of its Portfolio book imprint, where he continues to this day.

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