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Mention Elon Musk’s name on the internet, and prepare to face the wrath of the Musketeers. That’s just the way it works now that they — or the Musk Bros, or whatever you want to call the Tesla and SpaceX founder’s horde of devoted fans — are on constant high alert in defense of their chosen leader. For CEOs, it seems that being the object of affection for an increasing number of strangers is now part of the job description.
You don’t exactly have to possess Musk’s gifted, frenetic brain to figure out how we got here: Society has always had heroes, be those of war or art or politics. But entrepreneurs are particularly suited for our current moment, in which success in business is our primary marker of achievement. Business acumen doesn’t just get you money anymore; it can make you the most powerful man in the world.
The signs of CEO worship are everywhere: unprecedented venture capital funding for founders, media overemphasis on company leaders, and to use the most extreme and obvious example, the election of Donald Trump.
Carl Rhodes, co-author of the book CEO Society, notes that CEO worship has even spread to us as individuals. “If you hop onto Amazon and type in ‘CEO’, there’s many self-help books where you can ‘become CEO of your own love life’ or ‘date like a CEO,’ he says. “I can’t imagine what kind of awful date that would be, but nevertheless.”
It’s not a good thing: not for businesses, not for society, and not even for CEOs themselves. To explain why, I asked five scholars, whose reasoning ranges from leadership psychology to moral philosophy. Below, their lightly edited responses.
It overestimates the importance of leaders
Jeffrey Moriarty, philosophy department chair at Bentley University
People don’t like complexity or ambiguity. They want to simplify. Pointing to a person as the cause of this or that good or bad event is simple: “Ronald Reagan won the Cold War;” “FDR ended the great depression.” Telling a story about resources, systems, institutions, policies, and practices is a lot messier and more complicated, though likely to be more accurate.
The same goes for business. People want to be able to account for some business success or failure and it is easy to say, “Oh, it was because Jones was at the helm, or because Jones made this decision.”
This is not to say that leadership never matters, or that good decision-making is unimportant. Surely it is. But it’s probably a lot less important in general than people think. Leaders have an interest in perpetuating the belief that leadership is vital to organizational (of whatever kind) performance — it is a source of power for leaders.
Slavish devotion to a leader is incompatible with the kind of critical engagement that is necessary to prevent organizations from going down the wrong path, financially or morally.
It creates “secular fundamentalists” out of individuals
Ben Zeller, associate professor of religion at Lake Forest College
CEOs symbolize what we value as a culture. They fit the American self-image of the lone individual who succeeds based on their wits and raw determination. The CEO is the cowboy writ large.
Most people want something to believe in, and in an increasingly secularized age, CEOs offer a new target for devotion. We live in an era of unbridled capitalism, where consuming is what we do as a people.
We create and foster our identities by the clothing we wear, the phones we own, the music we download. Some people invest so much of themselves into the people and companies behind the technology that we consume, that they become effectively secular fundamentalists. If people invest so much of themselves in the ideals of a company or CEO, they will be let down when and if they discover that the company and CEO are driven ultimately by different goals than the consumer.
It perpetuates destructive ideologies
Carl Rhodes, co-author of CEO Society: The Corporate Takeover of Everyday Life
CEO worship, I think, is a feature of the latter stages of neoliberalism. A lot of it can be traced back to the changes in the global, political, economic situation from the 1980s where you had a shift toward a revival of traditional laissez-faire market-based economics. Business people in general have never been really heroic — in the 1960s, the so-called “organization man” was a fairly bland person wearing a gray suit who was thought of as a conformist, so it’s really a contemporary phenomenon to some extent.
If you look at at the phenomenon of Uber, rather than being seen as an employee, [an Uber driver is] positioned as an individual entrepreneur, a kind of mini-CEO of their own life.
The idea is that we see this kind of CEO mentality bleeding out into many other dimensions of life. We see this as quite a dangerous phenomenon because it’s all driven by values around success and individualism and competition and rivalry rather than about more traditional values around democracy, participation, collegiality, community and so forth. So increasingly our whole lives operate as if there’s some kind of competitive market where all we’re supposed to do is beat other people. If you look at Trump’s rhetoric, it’s always about winning. And it’s not just about winning — to prove that you’re winning, you have to have someone else losing.
It encourages CEOs to make worse decisions
Dennis Tourish, author of The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership
When people acquire extraordinary power, the effects tend to be rather negative. One business writer has said that being the CEO of the company today is the closest thing to being king of your own country. Well, history suggests that absolute monarchs become absolute tyrants, and that their sense of themselves becomes grotesquely inflated.
And for all sorts of psychological reasons, the more power an individual has, the less sensitive they become to the needs of other people and the less inclined they are to seek out advice in making crucial decisions, and the less likely to take any advice when they actually get it. My own research also suggests that people in that position are reluctant to facilitate critical communication from other people who have less power in making those decisions, so eventually people give up trying to offer it.
If they believe their own hype, they can become like a rock star surrounded by a sycophantic entourage, and the quality of their decisions will inevitably begin to decline. So the more a leader is lionized in the press or more popular they appear to be at one moment, the more wary we should be and the more we should expect a fall from grace to happen at any moment.
[By] encouraging the fallacious view that we need geniuses to run our companies, we’re doing all of ourselves a disservice. There are very few geniuses out there, and there aren’t enough to keep the economy or our organizations healthy. We have to find ways to engage the intelligence, the activism, the enthusiasm, the passion of people at more levels in the organizations that we rely upon.
It’s bad for business
Arun Sundararajan, professor at NYU Stern School of Business
Part of the American dream is that anyone can succeed like the most successful among us, so there’s an aspirational dimension to looking up to founders and CEOs. I think in particular in the tech space, there’s been a number of founder-CEOs who have not just been fabulously successful, but have also been successful rapidly, and in a context that is familiar to people. If I become a billionaire founder in meatpacking, that’s less a part of everyday life than if I build an app.
I think the key risk for employees and investors — and it’s tied up with the ownership structures that these CEO-founders are creating for their companies where a significant amount of control is retained by the founder — is that [when] the interests of the company or employees start to diverge from the founder, it becomes all the more difficult to make good decisions about what’s the best path forward for the company.
We saw this struggle at Uber recently that led to the founder leaving and a new CEO coming in. That was fraught with tension and difficulty because you had a wildly visible founder-CEO who was revered in certain circles.
From a societal point of view, this has led to certain expectations of entrepreneurship that can be harmful in the long run. We’re entering a phase of modern work where more people are going to have to be individual entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurship is at the foundation of what the future of work will be like. The visibility and adulation for the founder-CEO can often allocate the resources of society towards that kind of entrepreneurship, rather than the more common kind, which is opening a nail salon or a law practice.
What I see with students: When I say “entrepreneurship,” they think of Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs. In some ways, I want every undergrad these days to learn about entrepreneurship not so they can go off and create the next billion-dollar company but because I feel like they have to think like entrepreneurs to succeed in tomorrow’s world of business.
