CEOs model certain behaviors and encourage their employees to follow suit.
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Before he became an expert on corporate leadership, Charles O’Reilly spent five years in the U.S. Army. There he witnessed the stark divide between good and bad leaders and realized how much influence they had on the people who worked for them.
Now a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, O’Reilly says his time in the military sparked his interest in leadership, particularly his fascination with the “narcissist” personality type. “If you think about Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos, if you think about Travis Kalanick at Uber, they are people who the press looked at and said, ‘They are transforming the world.’ But in fact, at the end of the day, they destroyed organizations and people’s lives.”
This piece originally appeared in Stanford Business Insights from Stanford Graduate School of Business. To receive business ideas and insights from Stanford GSB click here: (To sign up : https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/about/emails ) ]