The failed defenestration of Sam Altman as OpenAI CEO offers two clear lessons. For disgruntled boards everywhere, it’s not to fire the CEO unless you’re sure they’ll stay fired. For Sam Altman himself, it’s that he is indispensable.
The majority of OpenAI’s staff and its lead investor Microsoft have signaled that they would rather work with Altman than with a version of OpenAI without him. To say his position as reinstated CEO is secure would be an understatement.
The technology sector is no stranger to indispensable, superstar CEOs whose genius, vision, and magnetic appeal seem to embody everything that makes their business special. It is also no stranger to the drama that tends to follow in their wake.
This can range from the scandalous to the bizarre. While there’s a big difference between the drama at OpenAI or Elon Musk’s shenanigans at X and the scandalous downfalls of Sam Bankman-Fried or Elizabeth Holmes, the common feature is the larger-than-life leader who is seemingly bigger than their business.
Why does this keep happening?
To an extent, if you have a business that aims for spectacular success, there is necessarily an increased risk of spectacular failure. And brilliant leaders who aim for radical change will sometimes miss the mark, likely by a wide margin.
But failure isn’t the problem. The problem is hubris. A leader may or may not be indispensable for their business. It’s hard to imagine Tesla would have become what it is without Musk, or Apple without Steve Jobs. They did bring something unique and transformative–and received adulation as a result.
Things go wrong when all the adulation goes to leaders’ heads, and they start to believe themselves to be not just indispensable but also infallible.
It’s hardly a new idea that power corrupts, but various studies have shown that it also leads to poor judgment, crystallizing biases, and preventing us from listening to other people. In effect, unchecked power makes us stupid and reckless, like Icarus flying too close to the sun.
Psychology professor Dr. Dacher Keltner’s 1998 “Cookie Monster Study” is a classic of the genre. He gave single group members a fleeting sense of power before asking them to share some cookies. They not only took more than their fair share but also displayed signs of “disinhibited eating,” chewing with their mouths open in front of others and making a mess. “People with power tend to behave like patients who have damaged their brain’s orbitofrontal lobes,” Keltner later wrote.
True superstar leaders and the antidote to hubris
There is a well-trodden path from brilliance to success, power, hubris, and ultimately disaster. Even the smartest leaders are at risk of following this path–but they do not have to.
Indeed, the most successful CEOs consciously share, rather than hoard power. They understand that no matter how brilliant they are, they won’t have all the answers, and that they will get things right more often if others challenge them.
Few know this better than Ann Hiatt, former executive assistant to Jeff Bezos at Amazon and later chief of staff to Marissa Meyer and then Eric Schmidt at Google.
"I think these larger-than-life CEOs are misunderstood when you only see the glorified Fortune cover version of them," Hiatt once told me. "For sure, their confidence and vision are incomparable. But they also think hard about how to help others to think well. And unquestionably that is why they have been as successful as they are."
The idea for Amazon Prime didn’t initially come from Jeff Bezos but from a rank-and-file employee.
Steve Jobs didn’t invent the iPhone. In fact, he wasn’t keen on the mobile market at all, until convinced by colleagues who thought differently.
And if it had been down to famously tech-averse superstar CEO Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway would probably never have bought Apple stock. One of his recently hired lieutenants placed the bet in 2016, convincing Buffett that Apple is as much a luxury consumer goods company as it is a tech firm. The move turned out to be one of Berkshire Hathaway’s most successful investments to date.
In each case, the leader set out to create a business that was more than themselves, where quality thinking could happen anywhere, and percolate through the ranks. In doing so, they not only made their business smarter but also insulated it from the risk that one day they would go off the rails.
Each of those businesses achieved amazing things over decades, and tellingly, they’re still here. What they share is not just brilliant, visionary leaders, but a system of leadership that builds on and goes beyond individual brilliance.
The lesson for founders and CEOs–even visionary ones–is that being indispensable is not something you want to be. Indeed, it’s a failure of leadership because it creates an insidious and unnecessary risk of hubris.
The most enduringly successful companies are deliberately bigger than their leaders, and the real superstars are the ones who invest in helping others shine.
Jennifer Sundberg is co-CEO of Board Intelligence and co-author with Pippa Begg of the book Collective Intelligence: How to build a business that’s smarter than you.
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