What narcissism means to me

I’ve borrowed the title of this essay from one of the funniest titles to a volume of poems I’ve ever seen. The volume is by Tony Hoagland and was published in 2003 by Graywolf Press. I’ll admit that, while I find Mr. Hoagland’s self-announcing poems tiresome after a few pages, they are better than yet more poems about some mom-poet or dad-poet taking their little ones to soccer practice or swimming lessons. And, of course, that’s what narcissism does—it announces it itself…“Here I am! Look at me!” In short, there is nothing subtle or sly about What Narcissism Means to Me.

But before we impugn Mr. Hoagland for taking us into the unlikeliest precincts of literary imagination where Hyperbole rules with an iron fist, this week’s Economist has an absolutely hilarious piece on two academics’ attempts to quantify narcissism as it pertains to the executives of public companies. To do this, the two in question, Arijit Chatterjee and Donald Hambrick of Pennsylvania State University, had to create a kind of Narcissism Index, one easily compiled from more-or-less objective criteria and applicable to business executives. According to The Economist, they did this by examining the following data:

• the prominence of the boss’s photo in the annual report
• his prominence in company press releases
• the length of his “Who’s Who” entry
• the frequency of his use of the first person singular in interviews
• the ratios of his cash and non-cash compensation to those of the firm’s second-highest paid executive

Satisfied that the index above captures something essential to measuring narcissism, the duo then applied the results to the management and performance of public companies in the technology and software sectors. They discovered that those bosses who scored high on the index, according to The Economist,

“…tended to make bigger changes in the use of important resources, such as research and development, or in spending and leverage; they carried out more and bigger mergers and acquisitions; and their results were both more extreme (more big wins or big losses) and more volatile than those of firms run by their humbler peers. For shareholders, that could be good or bad.”

It would seem, narcissism notwithstanding, that talent and luck count for a lot. Personality, in sum, does not seem to provide enough insight into the fortunes of America’s corporate elite.

Having said that, the whole exercise, which was presented this week at the American Academy of Management’s annual meeting in Atlanta, turns on whether the index measures anything worthwhile. I have spent a good deal of my professional life working in corporate communications—in fact, just today I have a freelance project on my desk which requires me to put words into the mouth of a chief executive—and I’ve been around long enough to know that the index above has some serious flaws, which isn’t to say that its measures are uninteresting, but perhaps not very relevant to narcissism as such. After all, there are some public companies—particularly those lighted traded or held largely by institutions or funds—whose main source of valuation is derived from the investors’ confidence in the CEO. It is only natural that one would feed that investor confidence by putting the CEO’s mug all over the company’s communications program. This requires not narcissism but pragmatism, and in any event, is not so much a product of the CEO’s personality, but the communications professionals’ willingness to exploit the celebrity of the CEO. Sure, the boss must sign off on such things, giving a form of tacit approval, but this carries us a long way from the premise with which the index is supposed to correlate. And then there is a score of other extenuating circumstances to consider alongside the role of the corporate communications in judging how narcissistic the boss is; for instance, if the company is a family business or start-up recently taken public, it would stand to reason that those companies would be a larger reflection of their founders, as opposed to, say, Ford Motor or Unilever. Perhaps the study addressed some of these concerns, and I’ll review the web once the Academy’s annual meeting has concluded to see if the full study makes it online.

In the end, can narcissism be measured? Of course, we all know it when we see it, excepting, perhaps, when we are the source of it, but can any objective measure reduce it to numbers? One of the books on my late summer reading list is Christopher Lasch’s 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, so I’m sure I’ll have occasion to revisit the topic in the near future. After all, there’s no finer place to explore narcissism than a web log.