It turns out that we could have anticipated the collapse of Enron as early as 1997, without ever
meeting Ken Lay or looking at a single number. The warning signs of Enron’s demise are visible in a
single image, captured four years before the company unraveled. Take a look at the two pictures of
CEOs below, reproduced from their companies’ annual reports. Both men started their lives in
poverty, worked in the Nixon administration, founded their own companies, became rich CEOs, and
donated substantial sums of money to charity. Can you tell from their faces—or their clothes—which
one was a taker?
The man on the left is Jon Huntsman Sr., a giver whom we’ll meet in chapter 6, from his
company’s 2006 annual report. The photo on the right depicts Ken Lay. Thousands of experts have
analyzed Enron’s financial statements, but they’ve missed an important fact: a picture really is worth
a thousand words. Had we looked more carefully at the Enron reports, we might have recognized the
telltale signs of takers lekking at the helm.
But these signs aren’t where I expected to find them—they’re not in the faces or attire of the
CEOs. In their study of CEOs in the computer industry, Chatterjee and Hambrick had a hunch that
takers would see themselves as the suns in their companies’ solar systems. They found several clues
of takers lekking at the top. One signal appeared in CEO interviews. Since takers tend to be self-
absorbed, they’re more likely to use first-person singular pronouns like I, me, mine, my, and myself—
versus first-person plural pronouns like we, us, our, ours, and ourselves. In the computer industry,
when talking about the company, on average, 21 percent of CEOs’ first-person pronouns were in the
singular. For the extreme takers, 39 percent of their first-person pronouns were in the singular. Of
every ten words that the taker CEOs uttered referencing themselves, four were about themselves