Comment by windexh8er

CEOs will often have unfavorable characteristics. From startups to billion dollar corporations I've experienced far fewer "genuine" CEOs than narcissistic assholes. The latter are so prevalent because they take the valuation of the company as one of their primary drivers. This means that, for them, removing any obstacle (customers included) is the path they will traverse.

I think the problems with "successful" CEOs don't paint the complete picture. Many CEOs come in after the hard work has been done and "final phase" CEOs enshittify the product and treat their partners and customers vastly differently than they did during their build phase. I experienced this first hand at Palo Alto Networks. At the time their second CEO (Mark McLaughlin) had just come into the org. Mark was one of those few genuine CEOs I experienced, probably one of the least narcissistic I've seen at that point in a young company's trajectory. However Nikesh Arora (Mark's successor) is a complete narcissistic asshole. I still talk to many in leadership there on the regular and the consistent theme is he's surely the reason PAN support and product quality has taken a dive compared to the engineering focus on product and customers back in the early 2010s.

There are a lot of papers surrounding CEOs and many look at the narcissistic angle [0][1][2]. The reality is a lot of these companies could operate just fine without a CEO. I find it hard to believe CEOs are even remotely worth their compensation packages given most of them have zero clue about the product or customs they serve anymore. This all flows back to the "shareholder value" bullshit the US economy is built on. If corporations had more restrictions in financial engineering maybe, just maybe, they'd actually try to better compete within their product/service space.

[0] https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/publications/n... [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0149206319892678 [2] https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/10/25/are-narcissistic-...