Years from now, when historians carbon-date that extinct species known as the celebrity CEO, they will trace its demise to a brisk February morning in 2009 and a wood-panelled room in Washington, D.C.
Eight Wall Street high rollers, their bearing sombre, their faces exsanguinated, were dutifully lined up for a congressional flogging. They had made a few frugal gestures in advance—leaving the corporate jets at home in favour of Amtrak; choosing modest hotels—yet these were quickly derided as posturing by a group of angry lawmakers.
"You come to us today on your bicycles, after buying Girl Scout cookies and helping out Mother Teresa, telling us, 'We're sorry. We didn't mean it. We won't do it again,'" sneered Democratic Representative Michael Capuano of Massachusetts. "America doesn't trust you any more."
Capuano could have put it more dramatically: America didn't revere them any more.
This grilling was many things: theatre, catharsis, political stagecraft. Yet it may ultimately prove to be something more: a definitive rupturing of the cult of the CEO, a kind of secular worship that has been steadily gaining adherents for the past 20 years.
The men who had assembled in Washington—Vikram Pandit of beleaguered Citigroup, Ken Lewis of the suddenly ailing Bank of America, and Lloyd Blankfein of the resilient Goldman Sachs, among others—weren't the worst offenders in their industry. They hadn't been accused of doing anything illegal, and they hadn't been dragged into court.
Yet that is precisely the reason that the financial industry's self-destruction may sound the death knell for the celebrity CEO. These men were disgraced even though they were pillars of the system, not rogues. They were feted in the media and richly rewarded, even as their cavalier bets paralyzed an entire economy. And they did it with full disclosure, not to mention the imprimatur of the boards of directors that were their supposed gatekeepers.
The rot wasn't hidden, in other words, but systemic—and the public's belated awakening to this fact may finally augur a changing of the guard, toward a new, and less transcendent, kind of corporate leader.
Crooked CEOs like Ken Lay and Bernie Ebbers had their day, notes Gideon Haigh, author of Fat Cats: The Strange Cult of the CEO. "But if anything, the excesses of Wall Street are an even greater indictment of the cult. The sums were accumulated in plain sight by the best and the brightest—the excuse that the miscreants represent merely a few bad apples is not available."
On May 9, 1986, Miami Vice aired "Sons and Lovers," the last episode of its sophomore season. As detectives Crockett and Tubbs loitered on a stakeout, Park Commissioner Lido—a tall, bespectacled man with greying hair and an avuncular mien—wandered over with some unsolicited assistance.
"If it's any help," he confided, "I know how to handle a gun."
This was a watershed moment. Lido was none other than Lee Iacocca, the shoot-from-the-hip executive credited with rescuing Chrysler Corp. from the brink and refashioning it as an automotive powerhouse.
Iacocca's visage was plastered everywhere in the 1980s. He graced magazine covers and newspaper pages. He made it onto lists of the most intriguing and influential men in America. His autobiography sold seven million copies. And he anointed himself pitchman for Chrysler's new line of K-cars, boldly telling viewers: "If you can find a better car, buy it."
The fact that a Detroit CEO was offered a cameo on prime-time's hottest series was one thing; the fact that people recognized him was something else entirely. Iacocca had brought the executive suite to Main Street, almost single-handedly creating the manager-as-saviour archetype and reshaping the way Americans thought about CEOs.
Some would argue that CEOs have always occupied a mythic place, for better and worse, in the popular consciousness. A century or so ago, big business was defined by robber barons and self-made industrialists—think Carnegie and Rockefeller—who amassed huge fortunes and later used this wealth to cement their legacies.
