You have to hand it to them!
The CEOs of today have a
patina of audacity, pompousness, and are gallant.
They are suave, stylish, urbane, dashing, vain-glorious and glib talkers
to fault. They have a surrealistic larger-than-life-persona. Contrast
this with the CEOs of yore. The yesteryear managers stayed miles
away from the glare of the pestering media. They were staid, sober and
less pompous. They mouthed politically correct lines, if at all they cared
to open one. But today's leaders as a tribe are made of radically
different mold. Iconic CEOs such as Andy Grove, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs,
and Jack Welch, are seen more than the Page 3 brigade and heard more
than the political bosses. These CEOs have their own battery of
publicist and Public Retaions Officers working overtime. They have the
chutzpah and gumption to write a book, give interesting sound bytes to
the news-hungry media and aggressively push their personal wisdom.
These new poster boys have become the toast of high-profile magazines
like BusinessWeek, Time and the like. Admittedly, these high-profile
corporate czars have come to redefine the broader contours of social and
personal discourses. These leaders are all over the place,
advising thegovernment to give impetus to the priority sector, exhorting
school kids what they should be learning, etc. We look upon them as
opinion makers. Do their opinions count? We cotton on to everything they
effortlessly pout - be it futuristic killer, applications or a book they
picked up for reading in the airport, or their choice of dream destination -
we lap it up with glee. The reasons as to why leaders have acquired
this larger-than-life persona are many. At one level, businesses have
come to appropriate larger role in our public and private space than
ever before and leaders find themselves seeped in fame and glory. At
another level, business landscape is on the cusp of
profound transmogrification and requires dynamic, charismatic leaders to
navigate through the sands of shifting times. Michael Maccoby, in
his path-breaking article, "Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros,
the Inevitable Cons" cites another reason for this growing clout of
new-age managers. According to him, the imposing and a
larger-than-life aura of the leaders of the day
comes pretty closest to the personality type that Sigmund Freud famously
called as Narcissistic. Freud, according to Maccoby describes narcissist
as people who make an effort to impress others with their
personalities. He further writes that such narcissist people tend to provide
support for others, don the mantle of leaders and may lend impetus to
demolishing well-entrenched notions and developing new thinking and
ways of existence. History is replete with instances of narcissists having
assumed center stage, led people from the front and deftly
architectured the political and social consciousness. History stands testimony
to the fact that societal discourses at some point or other were
shaped, sculpted and redefined by stalwarts such as Napoleon Bonaparte,
Mahatma Gandhi, and Roosevelt. Businesses, by virtue of being a
vehicle of greater social change had its fair share of narcissistic leaders
like, Andrew Carnegie, Edison, and Ford who capitalized on emerging
technologies and effected a major turnaround in American industries.
The situation that existed five decades ago holds true today also.
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