Listen--and learn.

It wasn't until he left Coca-Cola that Jack Stahl came to a realization: over 20 years of jotting notes during business meetings about what works--and what doesn't--he had framed out a book. After a stellar career that encompassed tenures as president of Coca-Cola and CEO of Revlon, it's no surprise that the 54-year-old had amassed plenty of war stories to back up the learning outlined in his book Lessons in Leadership, The 7 Fundamental Management Skills for Leaders at All Levels. But why did he choose to struggle through the onerous process of putting them on paper?

"One of the things I liked most about being an executive was coaching and developing people," shrugs Stahl, who is currently dividing his time between board service and speaking engagements. "So it felt like a natural outcome."

The prospect of competing with the surfeit of business books on the market doesn't faze the newly minted author. After all, competing for shelf space comes naturally to Stahl, who has successfully jockeyed for linear feet with the toughest of retail accounts--a feat he says he managed largely by listening.

"My experience has been that people over-talk with retailers," says Stahl, whose book urges leaders to create a unique selling proposition for their business. "People new to dealing with customers will spend 80 percent of their time talking, when you should really spend 80 percent of your time listening and trying to understand what the retailers' challenges and strategies are and where they're trying to take the business. That way you can tailor what you bring to the party and have a better proposition for them."

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As an illustration, he describes meeting with Wal-Mart shortly after joining Revlon, only to discover that the cosmetic company's standing with the retail giant was in jeopardy. Revlon, reported the Wal-Mart executive Stahl was meeting with, was selling less product in 14 feet of space than its closest competitor was selling in just eight. But rather than get defensive, Stahl took a collaborative stance.

"I asked a lot of questions about why his view of our sales productivity was what it was and what we could do about it," he recounts. "He suggested a test bed where we could apply some of what we believed would be best in class and some of what Wal-Mart believed to be best and see if we could demonstrate growth."

Revlon changed its marketing, merchandising approach and packaging. The result? "Not only did we protect our space, but over time we began to grow it substantially," says Stahl. "The lesson is, get out directly to your most important constituencies--internally and externally--listen and react immediately."

Stahl is also an advocate of using Economic Value Added to identify investment opportunities and motivate managers to make value-added business decisions. (EVA is defined as the difference between a company's net operating income after taxes and its cost of capital of both equity and debt.) "EVA is the only measure that incites an operating unit head to actually invest more in high-return areas and less in low-return areas," asserts Stahl, whose team at Coca-Cola relied upon EVA for performance-based compensation. "It balances margins, revenues, use of capital on one metric you can compensate against."

For Stahl, one of the biggest challenges of leadership is managing to be attentive to both detail and--simultaneously--the big picture. It's a challenge he grappled with early on at Coca-Cola by relying too heavily on the corporate marketing machine. "In a company like Coca-Cola, if you're not engaged in aggressively leading the business, the business will lead you," he notes. "From that I learned that there's no room, when running a business well, to sit back and be a spectator.

"You've got to be able to operate at 60,000 feet at 9 a.m. and at six feet at 3 p.m. And sometimes you've got to dive deep into details because if you spectate, your business will get away from you."