Are CEOs Today’s Heroes?
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| Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, Senior Associate Dean for Executive Programs and Lester Crown Professor in the Practice of Management, Yale School of Management | |
Q: You hear the term “heroic CEO” a lot lately. Has the way CEOs are perceived changed over the last few decades?
Yes, and it’s a double-edged sword. Throughout history, not to be too professorial, society has turned to where the greatest element of distress is, and then looked for figures that somehow simplify a path to get through that area of distress.
At a time of war, we look at the models of great generals or diplomats. In the time of westward expansion, of course, the pioneer spirit was ascendant. At other times, when invention and technological explosion are predominant, we look to these tinkering entrepreneurial pioneers, as well as great scientists. The people in these roles take on a heroic aura. Little kids read biographies about them and the press exalts them. That’s what has happened with CEOs. Amidst wrenching economic dislocation, the business leader is a figure that can be decorated as heroic.
They’re heroic not because they are the most noble figures in society, but because they are fulfilling this societal need. Physicians are saving lives every day, and we don’t necessarily consider them heroic. Maybe we should.
This partly comes from the self-conception of the leader. There is something in the heroic myth that matters to these people. Part of that is a sense of heroic mission. They want the world to be different because they lived. They want to be a net producer rather than a net consumer. It might look to us like Ozymandias, because it’s quixotic to think any individual is going to have a lasting legacy. But they think they can.
Another element of the self-conception of heroism in a leader is heroic identity. The media often confuse the two, as do academics, but heroic identity has to do not with this immortal quest, but with how other life roles often atrophy as your business card becomes your identity. A psychologist at Harvard named Robert Kegan talks about how, through life, we’re embraced by institutions—childhood, school, family, jobs—and then we’re released and we’re free agents. We move between the institutions, and that’s how we develop, vacillating between those poles. These leaders don’t. They become captured by their job. Since that job means so much to them, sometimes we over-read their motivations as pure greed or vanity. That’s too simple. Sure, there are elements of that, without doubt. But as jobs start to define them in so many ways, their identity becomes tied up in these things, like the platoons of public relations people that insulate them, the Knicks tickets, and the floral arrangements for life.
The other side of this equation is the society’s conferral of heroic stature on the individual. Why society cares is an ancient story. Joseph Campbell has captured this in his work The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which was an inspiration to George Lucas and all kinds of popular culture. He’s controversial as an anthropologist in this world of postmodern cultural relativists, because he argues that across cultures, across centuries, across religions and continents, there is a myth of the hero that society looks for. And the hero has certain universal characteristics. We want heroes to present themselves as of humble origins. When you look at presidential candidates, they all talk about their hardships, so they can reach their audience, their constituency. And CEOs will also try to present a common touch, no matter how many people are on the running boards of the staff car with little flags flying as they get off and the carpets unfurl. Then someone tells the hero that they’re different—a parent, a teacher. They go out on the heroic quest, seeking to differentiate themselves from society. So they go on their odyssey. But they’re still not great heroes. It’s only when they have the crushing setbacks, the filtering moments in life, that then society really gets interested. In their own minds they’re heroic before that, but for us they’re only heroic when they have triumphed over life’s adversity.
That’s become hotter than ever. The venture capital community and the executive recruiters have recognized that their best bets have come from people who have failed, who have learned from setbacks, and who have been battle-tested. And that’s why these Jamie Dimon types have become so much the vogue. In the past, the biographies would sometimes glide over some of the realities of what made people great.
CEOs are as important now, I think, as they’ve ever been. They were important at the turn of the prior century, too—Rockefeller and Carnegie. But it was a double-edged sword then also.
Q: How do you start to look at the effects that this heroic dynamic ends up having on corporate performance?
It’s huge. Right now there’s a cadre of business school professors and administrators whose work has disputed the importance of individual leaders, which is a shrieking irony. A lot of the writing coming out has looked at how the economic sector drives results more than individual performance. Fine. Let’s hold all those utilities constant and say that the way this retailer performed was determined largely by the fact that it was a retailer. But let’s look at the retailers as a group; the individual leaders in all those retailers explain the difference relative to one another. That’s what matters.
There is a tendency in much of academia to see it as too reductionist to focus on individual leaders. But it’s extremely important for management schools to understand that individual leaders make a difference. Wherever you go in this world, if there’s a city square or a village commons, there is a statue there. And it’s very rare that it’s a statue to a committee. It’s usually a celebration of a bold, thinking individual.
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