To hear Kevin Sharer tell it, he was not always a very good listener. And perhaps few would disagree. But one day, he had an epiphany when an IBM executive told him that listening was about comprehension. Until then, the outgoing Amgen ceo was more concerned with making sure he got his point across. “My conversations were all about some concept of intellectual winning and ‘I’m going to prove I’m smarter than you,’” he confesses in the McKinsey Quarterly, which is published by the consulting firm.
