Ego Check: Why Executive Hubris Is Wrecking Companies and Careers, and How to Avoid the Trap.

Ego Check: Why Executive Hubris Is Wrecking Companies and Careers, and How to Avoid the Trap. By Mathew Hayward. Kaplan Publishing | 251 pages | $24.95.

This is far more likely to be a cautionary tale for chief executives, chairmen and company founders than CFOs, who by nature are more cautious, backroom people than polarizing figures at center stage.

But author Hayward, an investor banker-turned researcher and academic, has written an intriguing and insightful book that makes tremendous use of detailed case studies. Two of the better known are the former (and present) CEOs of Apple Computer, Steve Jobs and John Sculley. Both fell victim to rapid success, lionization in the press and a kind of overweening pride that blinded them to dangers, Hayward writes. But Jobs, who was fired by Apple in 1985, only to return in 1997, learned to temper his emotions and recognize the importance of function over just form--an issue that Hayward says had hurt him at both Apple and NeXt, which he had founded after leaving Apple.

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Another example reviews the course of events at Hewlett-Packard, when then-CEO Carly Fiorina (again, a press favorite) whittled down her cadre of direct reports and, in Hayward's view, became increasingly isolated in the corner office. One key advisor, longtime CFO Bob Wayman, became alienated when his role seemed to be relegated mostly to compliance efforts, the author says.

Tech companies aren't the only places where such corporate kings emerge, of course; problems at Merck, NASA and Vivendi are also profiled as cases in which executive hubris resulted in devastating incidents or losses. Hayward's prose is lucid, and his ability to link corporate troubles with individual or collective hubris makes Ego Check a superb read that is entirely contemporary and applicable to today's corporation.