Ego Check: Why Executive Hubris is Wrecking Companies and Careers and How to Avoid the Trap Review

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Ego Check: Why Executive Hubris is Wrecking Companies and Careers and How to Avoid the Trap ReviewThe book Ego Check, by Mathew Hayward, seems like it was written exactly for me. It's about the tendency towards overconfidence in striving individuals. The four major hallmarks of same are: excessive pride and boastfulness; failure to listen to foils who tell you when you're wrong; refusal to get feedback about the outcome of your activities; and not planning for problems, consequences, and corrective measures in advance.
The author gives case studies that show how these four faults led to disaster in the case of mountain climber Rob Hall, business executives Jean Messiers, Meg Whitman, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, Dean Kamen, Merck in the Vioxx disaster, NASA in the Challenger and Columbia disasters, and The National Kidney program.
The only problem with the book is that it relies mainly anecdotal methodology to prove its points. It includes numerous cases where pride was very successful, such as Apple and Dell, where the same executive was guilty of hubris and of perfectly rational overconfidence. It espouses people like Jack Welch and Warren Buffet as role models for how not to let hubris get the better of their organization. But anyone who seriously studies these executives' activities might conclude, as I do, that these are sanctimonious scoundrels who are masterful at retrofitting their personae into a form that the media will love and whose judgment is superior to the free market.
As I read the book, I found myself thinking about my hobby, electric circuits. So many of them go into short circuits and uncontrollable output because the output is tied to the input in a positive feedback loop rather than a negative one that dampens the volatility and controls the output. Anyone who plays with op amps or amplifier circuits will know exactly how important is the dampening influence of monitoring the output and then controlling it when it gets out of a range.
A bit of modeling with economic, electrical, or game theoretic concepts like this would have helped to put many of the points in a more systematic form for me and would have led to many more testable hypotheses. And yet, Hayward is a Columbia PhD who collaborated on Harvard works, and professor of psychology at Colorado University, who has interviewed many of the actors in the case studies that he writes about. I find him particularly insightful. And I agree with his point that hubris is the key fault that leads to great disaster in striving individuals.
To his credit, Hayward realized that the mantra espoused by Collins in Good to Great, i.e., that the successful executive should be meek and humble and prudent at all times, is retrospective mumbo jumbo not suitable for the risks and leadership role successful executives must take in today's dynamic and uncertain world. The problem is how to differentiate the overconfidence that has a positive expectation, from the ones that will lead to disaster.Ego Check: Why Executive Hubris is Wrecking Companies and Careers and How to Avoid the Trap Overview

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