Nitin Nohria: Why CEOs Lose Touch With Reality

Five years separated two encounters with the same chief executive, and Nitin Nohria watched the man transform from someone who apologized for arriving late because of a taxi queue into a leader who showed up late in a chauffeured Escalade, flanked by a bodyguard and chief of staff, and offered no apology at all.

Nohria, the former dean of Harvard Business School, recounts the story in a new Fortune commentary as evidence of what he calls a quiet peril of the corner office: the slow loss of grounding. The CEO in question began humbly. He apologized profusely for keeping faculty waiting. He bussed his own coffee cup while peers left theirs for staff. He remarked on how unaccustomed he was to staying at the Four Seasons, where Harvard books all its CEO guests.

Five years later, his staff called ahead with different requests. They asked Harvard to upgrade him to a Four Seasons suite. They supplied a detailed list of his dietary preferences and favorite organic wine. They requested a private room for phone calls between sessions — something other CEOs handle from the lobby.

"He was never rude or overtly disrespectful," Nohria writes. "But after several years as CEO, his expectations had quietly changed." The extraordinary treatment surrounding him had become ordinary. Nohria notes the school itself was complicit: "We, too, were playing our role in defining what a CEO should expect."

The arithmetic of entitlement

Each accommodation a CEO receives solves a real problem and can be rationalized on its own, Nohria argues. Collectively, they can profoundly distort a leader's sense of what is normal — and of the lives of the people they employ and serve.

The demands are real. In a minute-by-minute study of how CEOs spend their days, co-authored with Michael Porter and published in Harvard Business Review in 2018, Nohria found CEOs put in 62.5 hours a week and work most weekends and vacation days. "Even when I'm not working, I'm thinking about work," one CEO told the researchers. Another described a whole second shift outside the office — the travel, the dinners, the miles logged representing the company.

Those pressures make private-jet travel easy to justify. Once everything is organized around a CEO's convenience, Nohria writes, expecting others to bend their time to the CEO's schedule becomes easier too.

The emotional toll adds another justification. CEOs must project confidence while doubting themselves and reassure employees during crises that test their own fortitude. One leader described it to Nohria as an emotional asymmetry — absorbing everyone else's emotions without expressing any of your own. A calculus sets in: given how much I do for others, this is the least I am owed. Many people work long hours under severe strain, Nohria notes, but CEOs have the power to convert their sense of sacrifice into special treatment.

Security accelerates the bubble

Some of that treatment is genuinely necessary — and sometimes pressed on executives whether they want it or not. The December 2024 shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan sidewalk has made companies rightly anxious about their leaders' safety, Nohria writes. Depending on the threat, armed bodyguards, armored vehicles and private flights can be sensible security measures. The trouble, he argues, is that before long a leader experiences as essential what first felt imposed. Others may have built the bubble with the best intentions. "But it morphs into their own."

Narcissism alone does not explain the pattern. Psychoanalyst Michael Maccoby and others have argued that CEO roles attract individuals who already carry narcissistic traits. But Nohria's Harvard colleague Rakesh Khurana points to a different force: "structurally induced narcissism." The adulation, constant attention and deference surrounding a CEO can make these tendencies nearly inevitable, even in leaders with no predisposition. From day one, the symbols of importance accrue — invitations from heads of state, colleagues who orient themselves around the CEO's preferred presentation of information, favored causes, even preferred manner of voice.

The pattern is not new. A quarter-century ago, the details of retired General Electric CEO Jack Welch's retirement package spilled into public view during a divorce. They included an $11 million Manhattan apartment, unlimited use of a company plane, a chauffeured limousine, flowers, dry cleaning, wine, and premium sports and entertainment seats — all at GE's expense. Welch gave up most of the benefits within days but saw nothing to apologize for. "In this particular deal, I sacrificed millions of dollars," he said. By his own reckoning, he had negotiated the package legally with GE's board, and having grown the company's market value by billions of dollars, he felt he had earned it.

The countermeasures

Nohria is blunt about where responsibility lies: the problem cannot be left entirely to a leader's self-discipline. Boards and senior colleagues should periodically reconsider which accommodations still serve a purpose and make it possible to question those that do not.

CEOs need to fight the forces themselves. Nohria prescribes regularly shifting perspective — asking, "This may feel normal to me, but how does it look from the outside?" — and cultivating a handful of intrepid truth tellers: a leadership coach, a wise general counsel or CHRO, people close to the frontlines and customers. That requires making disagreement safe, especially for people whose jobs depend on the CEO's goodwill.

The most grounded leaders, he observes, guard childhood friendships and pursue activities with people whose lives differ from their own — pickup basketball, book clubs. One CEO sets aside two evenings a week for dinner at home. "It's not about the meal," he told Nohria. "It's about being reminded that I'm just Dad."

Some refuse the conveniences outright. A prominent Harvard Business School alumnus whose name adorns a campus building always declined the school's offer of a car from the airport and rented his own. "I prefer to drive myself," he would say. Visiting one of his factories, he parked in the regular lot far from the entrance and skipped the executive dining room for the employee cafeteria.

Making such inconvenient choices while stressed, tired and running behind takes discipline. Its value, Nohria concludes, lies in preserving contact with the lives of people the leader must touch — which may help to lead them more effectively.