Are You CEO Material?

I was reading another inspiring book the other day, which prompted me to write again... I will reveal the name of the book at the end, but I guess it is a required reading for all young and up-and-coming CEOs. First a checklist:

• Are you charming and have high IQ? (This should be obvious, if not obvious, well, consider some other métier)

• Do you have absence of nervousness? (All CEOs always put out fires, small or large, here and there, and you need nerves of steel, still an obvious)

• Do you have lack of remorse or shame? (Now things are getting a bit nasty. All CEOs need to handle dirty things, or have their minions handle those for them, and you should be able to make tough calls and move on)

• Do you have pathological egocentricity? (Well, current role model CEOs have some sort of egocentricities, despite being under disguise of pseudo-humility patterns in the last decade.)

• Do you have absence of delusions and other signs of irrational thinking? (We do not want lunatics, obviously... yeah there had been some around)

  
  

These were some of the better traits. Let’s go to the dark side for a minute. 

How about the following:

• Are you untruthful and insincere? (This is the part when you need to lie very convincingly when need arises. Oh c’mon, that happens all the time, remember last quarter’s investor meeting?)

• Do you have general poverty in major affective reactions? (This is when you need to make rational decisions without emotional consequences. Remember, you are a results oriented business machine)

• Do you have incapacity for love? (Because of the previous trait, no emotions mean no love, you cannot and you should not love. You can marry, that is encouraged though)

• Do you have impersonal sex life? (This means usually infidelity, you cannot love anyway, therefore, social contracts should not mean anything)

• Do you have fantastic and uninviting behaviour with drink and sometimes without? (This is a very classical psychological term, meaning, you can really party with drinks and sometimes you do not even need any stimulant to do fantastic things to impress people)

  
  

  

Now you are getting a drift of this, I guess. These are not really the necessary traits of CEOs, but actually the symptoms of sociopathic behaviour described by Hervey Cleckley in 1941. 

But the book I am reading is making excellent analogies of these traits, with everyday life and in fact explaining how she (author is a successful sociopath) made it. 

And when you look at the biographies/autobiographies of successful (that is another term we need to agree) visionaries, CEOs, we tend to treat them usually like “yeah he is a bit eccentric, but that’s how it works” or “that woman is a killer, she does not hesitate kick ass around”. 

I guess, as our until our collective consciousness in business world is moving from “green” to “teal” level, and the millenials (or millenial spirited individuals) are moving to management positions, we will see these sociopathic tendencies will become obsolete, hopefully. And we will look at those archaic CEO models like spaghetti westerns, with a basket of popcorn. 

Bottomline, my dear reader, if you have some of the traits, great, you can become a senior executive, in a slow learning organization. Eventually.

If you do not, even better, you are destined to do great things, in a bleeding-edge, highly energetic company. Study holacracy.