The CEO’s New Clothes

Thursday, September 8th, 2005

According to The CEO’s New Clothes, a kinder, gentler leadership style gets results:

Fortunately, it turns out that such soft skills can lead to hard numbers. Raj Sisodia, professor of marketing at Bentley College, Jag Sheth, of Emory University, and writer David Wolfe recently completed a study of companies they call ‘Firms of Endearment’ (which will also be the title of their upcoming book). Unlike most students of corporate exceptionalism, Sisodia, Sheth, and Wolfe began their research by winnowing down a list of several hundred top firms based on a human-performance screen. How did they treat suppliers, environmentalists, and their communities? How good were their CEOs at inspiring employees? After doing detailed case studies on 60 of these firms, they came up with a list of 35 that had the best records.

When the authors turned to financial performance, they found that the public companies in their sample returned 758% over 10 years, versus 128% for the S&P 500. Over the past five years — a particularly tough period during which the S&P lost 13% — these firms returned 205%.

In each case, these organizations are led by CEOs who inspire respect, loyalty, and even affection, rather than fear. They are, if you will, ‘Aquarian CEOs’ — farsighted, tolerant, humane, and practical. And they have the courage of their idealistic convictions, even when it means staring down myopic criticism from Wall Street. The businesses they run, it turns out, are the kind we like to cover. Among them: Costco, Whole Foods, Best Buy, Toyota, and JetBlue.

I’m not sure how scientific that study sounds, but being farsighted, tolerant, humane, and practical might be worth giving a try.

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gaikokumaniakku: The 19th century glorified robber-baron capitalism along with other myths of individual heroes. They forgot that Newton said he was standing on the shoulders of giants — and of course they also forgot that when Newton said that, he was referencing a long string of writers who had used the phrase for hundreds of years, back to Bernard of Chartres: “We are like dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by...
Harper’s Notes: RAND developed the Delphi Method during the early Cold War for estimating thermonuclear warfare casualties among other things. It works well under the right circumstances. Uses anonymity and sequential polling. But the right circumstances are generally difficult and rare. Most recently the Super-forecaster Project (Tetlock) has resulted in several the high-scorers participating in (betting) prediction markets, in which there are both advantages and disadvantages in non-anonymity.
Gaikokumaniakku: I greatly enjoyed both Runaway and Looker in the 1980s. Marginally relevant link: Starring the Computer: Computers in Movies and Television Starring the Computer: Computers in Runaway (1984)
Gaikokumaniakku: This is why crazy paradigm-breakers have so much potential for improvements to the collective system. Sadly, the rewards usually don’t work out. Crazy, dishonest charlatans are often rewarded, and crazy honest autistic crusaders for truth are usually burned at the stake. I think it was Colin Wilson who claimed the crucial distinction between real thinkers and followers was that real thinkers were capable of breaking away from socially acceptable paradigms.
Isegoria: It looks like Looker is on YouTube!
TRX: Crichton was also a novelist — a fairly good one – and wrote almost all of his own screenplays. He should have known the screenplay for Runaway stank. Watching Runaway a few months ago, I had a hard time believing it was a Crichton movie; it’s a mess. I didn’t like all of Crichton’s movies, but they were put together better than that. While on the Critchton subject, I’d like to make a plug for Looker, done about the same time as Runaway, but much better. Crichton had a...
Isegoria: Lower attendance is what we’re going for.
Bob Sykes: The problem facing all colleges and universities is that the number of white 18 year-olds, the primary consumers of college, is declining rapidly both relative to other races and absolutely. Many small liberal arts colleges are decidedly second rate academically, and so are the students they cater to. So, neither the loss of the schools nor the loss of the students is really a big deal. The health of the college system and the meaningfulness of the degrees awarded is actually better off...
Isegoria: Rising Sun came a decade later. I remember reading the novel right around when I read Jurassic Park. The Terminator, on the other hand, came out the same year as Runaways and was a much bigger deal.
Kentucky Headhunter: Huh, I remember Runaway being a fairly frequent Saturday afternoon movie option on cable. Not to the level of Rising Sun, but it was on at least once every three or four months. Now, unlike Rising Sun, I never actually left it on…
TRX: Crichton usually got his computer stuff correct, though. He picked up a degree in “computer graphics” while he was getting his M.D. at Harvard. When he decided he didn’t care for doctoring, he went to Hollywood and made more computer-ish movies than doctor-ish ones. I only discovered “Runaway” earlier this year; I thought I was familiar with all of Crichton’s movies, but apparently not. I don’t remember ever seeing any mention of it anywhere.
Isegoria: Crichton clearly had little interest in the details of weapons. In the movie, a household robot goes rogue and acquires a revolver — which makes a pump-action shotgun racking sound before each shot and leaves a ragged two-inch hole in the drywall. Sigh. So I’m not surprised he gets his warships mixed up.
Lucklucky: “battleship Sheffield” It was a mere destroyer not a battleship…
Jim: Equanimous Independence Day!
Buckethead: Adjacent to Atomic Rockets is ToughSF. Well researched and fascinating speculation on space. He posts only every so often, but he did do an interesting series on stealth – and piracy — in space.
Isegoria: Thanks for putting in the work, George. Grok also kept pointing to this blog. Apparently AI struggles with comments repeated across multiple pages.
George: Gemini claims (and I haven’t confirmed) that it’s: …a classic historical description written by the Scottish physician and traveler Dr. John Macculloch in his 1824 book, The Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland.He used this vivid phrase to describe the famous and treacherous pass of Glencroe… After searching all three volumes as PDFs, I’m pretty sure Gemini is hallucinating. And substantial time spent searching keeps leading me back to this blog. Cough up the...
Isegoria: I don’t think you’re alone in your struggle, Handle.
Grymalkin: Rudolf Jung (b.1882 – d.1945) was the first principal theoretician of National Socialism, a Sudeten-German trade-unionist and railway engineer who joined the Austro-Hungarian German Workers’ Party (later German National Socialist Workers’ Party, DNSAP) in 1909 and was heavily responsible for both building up the early successes of the movement and for establishing close links in the post-WWI era with emerging National Socialist parties in other German-speaking areas...
Handle: I liked Cal Newport’s World Without Email, but I have proven to be poor evangelist for its message. The default mode of email of permissionless universal access is bad (compare to needed to get affirmative consent for “direct liaison authority” like in the military) and everybody says they hate it but no one is willing to give up even a little bit of that capability, even though it’s essential to any system of attention preservation and disciplined communications. Sorry...

Isegoria

The CEO’s New Clothes

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