Piecing together the psyche of impactful C-Suite players

Summary: Autobiographical accounts give exposure to the inner workings of the minds of C-Suite executives and leaders of all stripes.

Business fiction requires an author to peep into the minds of an ensemble of heroic and villainous characters within many businesses. In this regard, I've found autobiographical books to be particularly insightful for understanding and peeling the layers underneath the psyche of the characters who have the dynamism to create behemoths or the dastardly ability to recklessly blow up companies, which were once feted as models of successful innovation.

Noteworthy are books related to some of the technology disruptors, including Bill Gates’ Source Code: My Beginnings, Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, Ashlee Vance’s Elon Musk: Tesla, Space X and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, and Kara Swisher’s Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, on the tech bros, including Mark Zuckerberg. These books collectively give a peek into the background and environs that fueled the maniacal will to win, persistence, and resilience of these disruptors. To an extent, the books also humanize these larger-than-life figures. I learnt that the sometimes chippy and trolling-inclined Elon Musk was a bullied loner who had an overbearing dad.  Geeky Bill Gates was privileged and precocious.  He, nonetheless, consistently stretched himself out of his comfort zone, including taking a lead role in a theatrical play while in high school. He also sounded like he may have suffered heartbreak after inviting his first 'crash' to the prom only to get the thumbs down. And, along with his Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen, he had to fend off parties trying to fleece them of the fruits of their labor. And I also learnt how a coterie of new-age beliefs shaped a free-spirited Steve Jobs.

I’ve also recently read books about characters whose moral turpitude led to the collapse of the once-iconic firms they led.  For instance, Michael Lewis’s Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon is the complicated tale of the CEO of FTX crypto-brokerage, the ‘ultra-rationale’ billionaire, Sam Bankman-Fried, who was convicted of defrauding clients. Another book of figures who gained notoriety is Betty McClean’s and Peter Elkind’s The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron. I recall, in the fall of 2001, while among a cohort of fellow newly-enrolled finance post-graduate students, starry-eyed, I toured Enron's London office. At the time, our professors wanted us to be exposed to an innovative financial engineering company. Shockingly, a few weeks later, the edifice crumbled, and Enron filed for bankruptcy. Fingers were pointed at the company's deceptive accounting practices. Shortly after, Enron's auditor, Arthur Andersen, one of the Big-Five, collapsed, deemed culpable for Enron's accounting shenanigans.

Back then, confounded and eager to unpack the full extent of Enron's reporting chicanery, I was drawn to the topic of creative accounting, along with how investors assess the information in annual reports. It contributed to my pursuit of a career related to the development of accounting standards, where I initially focused on advocating for the investor perspective.

With the tons of articles and papers I’d read on Enron, I thought I had a reasonably good grasp on pretty much what there was to discover. Yet, I found McClean’s and Elkind’s book hard to put down. It's a cautionary tale and reminder of the perils of ‘smartassolatry’, if I’m allowed to cobble such a word.  Hubris is inevitable when those who should serve as watchdogs abandon their obligation to exercise skepticism and instead allow whizz kids to razzle-dazzle and run rings around them. Brilliance bereft of a moral fiber and inner humility is akin to a brakeless Ferrari speeding on a highway- it's an accident waiting to happen. The book added layers to my understanding of the highly regulated, inefficient, and ineffective energy sector that incentivized the emergence and initial flourishing of Enron and its Chairman, Ken Lay, and CEO, Jeffrey Skilling. I must admit, though, unlike for the uber-arrogant, pugnacious Jeff Skilling, I felt a tinge of sympathy for Ken Lay, holder of an energy economics doctorate, who’d earned his stripes in his ascent to the apex of the sector and been an adviser to top US administrations, only to spectacularly squander it.

For a prosaic and panoramic insight into the mindsets of top executives, I've also read Dambisa Moyo’s How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World and Steve Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO.

To sum up, reading autobiographical books can equip the armoury of business fiction writers as it exposes one to the inner workings of the minds of C-Suite players and leaders of all stripes.