43
in that moment, or if a few had broken ranks, it
might have gone very differently,” he says. “They
chose in that moment to see themselves as part of
civil society, acting in the defense of democracy
for its own sake.”It was perhaps InevItable that Trump, the
corporate- showman President, would force the pri-
vate sector to reconsider its duty to society—and
that Sonnenfeld would be the one to force the issue.
For 2020 was not the two men’s first confrontation.
Back in the mogul’s reality-TV days, the business
guru was a harsh critic—before burying the hatchet
and giving Trump the idea for Celebrity Apprentice.
A Philadelphia native, Sonnenfeld, 67, was
drawn from an early age to the human side of busi-
ness. “He was always irrepressible, uninhibited—
just a barrel of monkeys,” recalls the public re-
lations guru Richard Edelman, who rowed crew
with Sonnenfeld at Harvard. “You always knew he
would be either a politician or a professor, not one
of the gray-suited soldiers coming out of Harvard
Business School.”
Sonnenfeld authored several scholarly publica-
tions before his 1988 book, The Hero’s Farewell:
What Happens When CEOs Retire, became a sur-
prise best seller. CEOs sought his counsel, and
he realized they were starving for such insights:
surrounded by subordinates and yes-men, pow-
erful executives had plenty of opportunities topontificate but few venues for learning from their peers. Yet Sonnenfeld’s
interest in leadership psychology was unfashionable in an M.B.A. field fo-
cused on the technical workings of companies and markets. Denied ten-
ure at Harvard, he started his “CEO College” at Emory University in 1989.
After a decade, he moved it to Yale, where his Chief Executive Leadership
Institute helped put its School of Management on the map. Today, Son-
nenfeld’s executive seminars have many imitators, including CEO sum-
mits put on by Forbes, Fortune, Bloomberg and the New York Times.
When The Apprentice premiered in 2004, Sonnenfeld reviewed it for
the Wall Street Journal. The show, he wrote, was teaching aspiring lead-
ers precisely the wrong lessons while fueling public disdain for business.
“The selection process resembles a game of musical chairs at a Hooters
restaurant,” he wrote. “No new goods or services are created, no busi-
ness innovations surface, and no societal problems are solved.” A real-life
leader who tried to run a business that way would quickly fail, he added.
Trump fired back, insulting Sonnenfeld as a know-nothing academic.
But he also tried to win him over, offering Sonnenfeld the presidency of
Trump University, which he turned down, and an invitation to his West-
chester golf club, which he accepted. Over lunch, Sonnenfeld said he’d
stop criticizing the show if the players were cranky B-list celebrities in-
stead of earnest young strivers. Trump liked the idea, and the following
season he transitioned to an all-celebrity cast.
Sonnenfeld finally gave in to Trump’s pestering and invited him to one
of his CEO summits at New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel. “You would have
thought it was the Pope, people were so amazed,” Sonnenfeld recalls. “But
at the same time, the top tier of CEOs told me, ‘When he walks in, we’re
walking out.’ And they did.” After Trump won the presidency, Sonnenfeld
paid him a visit at Trump Tower and reminded him of the incident. “Funny
thing about that, Jeff,” Trump said, “they’re all coming by here now.”
Over the course of the 2016 campaign, Sonnenfeld’s surveys of his sem-
inar participants found that although around 75% identified as Repub-
licans, 75% to 80% supported Hillary Clinton, he says. And while many
were optimistic about Trump’s pro- business Administration, their enthu-
siasm soon dimmed. It wasn’t just the chaotic way he operated; he seemed
PREVIOUS SPREAD: YALE SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT; THIS SPREAD: OLIVIER DOULIERY—BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGESdetermined to pit them against one another. “I started hearing from the