alone and no one else.
Another signal was compensation: the taker CEOs earned far more money than other senior
executives in their companies. The takers saw themselves as superior, so they felt entitled to
substantial pay discrepancies in their own favor. In the computer industry, a typical taker CEO took
home more than triple the annual salary and bonus of anyone else in the company. By contrast, the
average across the industry was for CEOs to earn just over one and a half times the next highest paid.
The taker CEOs also commanded stock options and other noncash compensation of seven times higher
than the next highest paid, compared with the industry average of two and a half times higher.*
But the most interesting clue was in the annual reports that the companies produced for
shareholders each year. At the top of the next page are the pictures of Ken Lay and Jon Huntsman Sr.
that I showed you before, but now they’re in context.
The photo on the left appeared in Huntsman’s 2006 annual report. His image is tiny, taking up less
than 10 percent of the page. The photo on the right appeared in Enron’s 1997 annual report. The image
of Lay takes up an entire page.
When Chatterjee and Hambrick looked at the annual reports from the computer companies, they
noticed dramatic differences in the prominence of the CEO’s image. In some annual reports, the CEO
wasn’t pictured at all. In other reports, there was a full-page photo of the CEO alone. Guess which
one is the taker?
For the taker CEOs, it was all about me. A big photo is self-glorifying, sending a clear message:
“I am the central figure in this company.” But is this really a signal of being a taker? To find out,
Chatterjee and Hambrick invited security analysts who specialized in the information technology
sector to rate the CEOs. The analysts rated whether each CEO had an “inflated sense of self that is
reflected in feelings of superiority, entitlement, and a constant need for attention and admiration...