Arrogance, and Why it Will be Back

You almost have to feel sorry for the post-millennial masters of the universe, those quintessential giants of business and technology. For months, they haven't known what to do with themselves. An era of recession and scandal is no time to strut, so famously self-satisfied divas have been on an enforced holiday from preening overconfidence (at least in public). But the good news, for them, is that this is no paradigm shift. Arrogance will be back.

As entrepreneurs are fond of declaring (without being asked) unreasonable self-confidence is an often-crucial ingredient to success and innovation — in business or in almost anything else, for that matter. Sure, the trait fell out of favor at the height of the Enron backlash. (At one point, observers acted as if they'd found a smoking gun in the fact that the firm called itself "the world's greatest company." The scoundrels!) But you don't have to be major-league asshole — much less an apologist for Skilling and company — to recognize that many of our greatest innovators have been, and remain, insufferably arrogant people.

"Larger-than-life leaders" are classic narcissists in the Freudian sense, says anthropologist and psychoanalyst Michael Maccoby, whose book The Productive Narcissist will be published by Broadway Books next year. They are charmers and risk-takers, big personalities with big visions. From business history, he points to Carnegie, Rockefeller, Edison, Ford. His more recent examples are just as familiar: Welch, Jobs, Gates. Writing in the Harvard Business Review in early 2000, he noted that such heroes were so popular that many of us had forgotten the "inevitable cons" of this archetype — the "feelings of grandiosity" that success creates, pushing some visionaries to lose hold of reality, then crash and burn. He says dryly: "People are more aware of those downsides now."

No kidding. Set aside the inevitable hindsight-driven backlash and consider the surprising success of Jim Collins' recent book, Good To Great. A key element in the leadership style at the successful companies he studied is, of all things, humility. It's a line of thinking that serves as a kind of antidote to the near-comical hubris of the departed dot-com era, when earth-shattering visionaries were a dime a dozen. (Or, on Sand Hill Road, $100 million a dozen.) But even Collins says it would be big mistake to read his book as a case for meekness, since a "ferocious willfullness" is still critical to such leaders.

At the moment, though, any business leader professing wild-eyed confidence might simply sound like a kook. So expect the New Arrogance to remain understated for a while. How long that lasts will depend on how quickly a fresh round of success stories emerges. A new invention, a scientific breakthrough, a suddenly hot sector — these are the things that energize narcissists. Meanwhile, the egocentrism gene now lying dormant is sure to spring back to life. Consider Craig Venter, the departed CEO of Celera Genomics, who recently revealed his DNA was the primary sample used to decode the human genome. Arrogant? He's heard that "so many times, I've gotten over it," he announced.

In other words, egocentrism springs eternal. As one longtime Silicon Valley observer puts it, there's really no way to replace the potentially combustible mix of motivators - changing the world, getting rich, amassing power - that drives entrepreneurs. That's especially so in the technology field, he adds, where the prevailing attitude remains: "It's perfectly fine to be an arrogant jerk, as long as it's in the service of more than getting rich."

Ultimately, though, self-infatuation thrives or falters for reasons that have as much to do with our attitudes toward the leadership class as with the hardwiring of leaders themselves: You can't have a pied piper without a steady supply of followers willing to let someone else think for them.

Collins hopes that this time people will at least adopt a more thoughtful view of the "great CEO model" and not simply fall in line behind whatever visionary is blowing his own horn from a hundred magazine covers. But, he acknowledges, "in a complex world, people are going to look for simple answers." So if (that is, when) arrogance makes a comeback, those of us in the peanut gallery shouldn't just blame the arrogant jerks, but rather ourselves. When success stories bloom, and we hear fresh tales of entrepreneurs who won big buy defying the odds, it'll be easy to remember how important it is for innovators to have the courage of their convictions — and to forget about the delusions-of-grandeur problem. Then again, those masters of the universe could have told you they were never to blame.

A similar version of this story appeared in the July 2002, issue of Wired.