The X Factor for CEOs
I can’t help feeling that taking up the position of CEO of a big corporate is becoming like being a contender on some sort of X Factor tv show, where popularity with a non-expert audience matters more than expert insight. That’s OK for the entertainment business, but far more dangerous for company leadership.
We’re used to sports and TV stars being reduced to a two-dimensional cliché – but not so much with our business leaders. Looking at online chatter in twitter and blogs in the last couple of days, we’ve had rock stardom for Steve Jobs at Apple and mass booing for Leo Apotheker at HP.
There are plenty of other places you can read about their respective success levels – I’m not going into that here – but what about this growing trend for very public, rather clichéd depictions of business leaders? If it develops further and begins to influence our corporate culture more significantly, we could have a real problem.
The business problem
Who would want shareholder support for CEO candidates to be influenced by a public image (good or bad) that may be so over-simplified that it’s meaningless?
Criticism of the CEO (justified or not) often means brand damage for the company, affecting confidence and share price.
Those of us advising companies on innovation strategy always emphasise the critical need for a culture where failure is accepted and learned from – but how can we manage that when the X Factor culture works against it, creating an environment where people are scared of a public label?
These two-dimensional depictions are under constant pressure to remain so. Once the stampede of comments depicting someone in a particular way gets going, it becomes increasingly difficult to see any dissent from the general direction the herd has taken. Put another way, labels on twitter use super-glue as standard – despite all the complexity that really exists within a person and their career.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t be free to comment (far from it) but I do see that we need to be ready for a potential, serious downside – one that will make it more difficult to create the right environment for innovation to thrive.
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Excellent post making some very good points.
Intertwining the fate and reputation of the “face” of a company with the brand itself is always going to be tricky, and potentially damaging even given that there are plenty of businesses which aren’t lucky enough to have a Steve Jobs at the helm – from a crisis managment point of view all you need to do is look back at what News International has going through this year; a bad situation made worse by the way the figureheads (Brooks AND Murdoch) dealt with it. What kind of message did it send to Wapping employees when Uncle Rupert stood so steadfastly behind one employee and left others hanging out to dry.
So what’s the answer? Integrate the personal brand of the CEO with the brand values of the company? That may well take away from the fact that the CEO’s personality may help develop the brand itself, thereby stifling an innovative culture for the sake of stability in the eyes of the public.
I suppose the real issue is that if you as a CEO really are going to engage with the media, be prepared for the fallout when a crisis happens and know how to deal with it, both personally and for the sake of the business, and balance that against the drive to create and support a figurehead that differentiates a business from its “greyer” competitors.
No easy fix, but Claire’s point that failure should at least be tolerated if not celebrated is an extremely good one.
Thanks Steve – all good points and very topical examples. I hate to think what the recent leadership behaviour at NI has done to its company culture but it can’t have been good! I also like your point about the pros and cons of integrating the personal brand of the CEO with the brand values of the company. I guess wherever you work there’s always some sort of magician’s balancing act required between ‘stability’ that reassures people and ‘new stuff’ that reassures people. Cheers, Clare