Busting the Myth of the Heroic CEO

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What I nevertheless like about this screed is that by dwelling on the dubious genre of corporate tributes, it reminds readers how susceptible business leaders are to monumental self-delusion. That capacity for vain irrationality helps explain Wall Street's subprime-financing fiasco of 2008 (sure, we should underwrite billions in mortgages that borrowers can't possibly pay back!), just as it can be found entwined with the roots of the Enron/WorldCom-era corporate scandals, the late-1990s dot-com mania, the savings-and-loan crisis, and so on, back through the history of capitalist debacles.

Rather than take business legends at their word, Professors Villette and Vuillermot propose interpreting the laudatory biographies according to Sigmund Freud's principles for analyzing neurotic dreams. Distortion and displacement come into play.

Airline tycoon Richard Branson, the authors contend, emphasizes his dedication to the public interest and distaste for high unemployment as a way of displacing his tendency to pay many employees modestly and to shelter corporate earnings in offshore tax havens. Claude Bébéar, the French insurance mogul, distracts himself from a hard-nosed decision to bring in the police to deal with strikers by focusing instead on his visit to the charming home of the Minister of Justice. Before he can request platoons of strikebreakers, the powerful executive must obey the demand of the minister's wife that all guests put on cloth slippers when entering her salon. Such delightful details obscure Bébéar's true nature as "a heartless boss" and an "advocate of repression," according to the authors.

Don't expect Wharton or Harvard to start offering a joint graduate degree in business administration and psychotherapy. No university is likely to take this line of reasoning that seriously—and even if a business school were to try to get on this wavelength, the authors of From Predators to Icons provide little in the way of constructive prescriptions for a curriculum. But their intemperate cry from the ivory tower is an amusing counterbalance to the usual paeans to occupants of the C-suite.

Barrett is an assistant managing editor at BusinessWeek.

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