ARE BUSINESSMEN joining the celebrity game along with movie stars, game show hosts, politicians, fugitive religious leaders, and sports figures? How did the once quiet figures of business get onto the social radar?
CEOs are getting publicly known, sometimes by their initials, even by those who don’t work in the companies they run. These admirers may just be looking for jobs or temporary support in the journey through life. Anyway, the wealth that endows prestige can sometimes be hard to check for accuracy, even rounded off to the nearest million. How much of it is borrowed, or merely claimed?
The size of a conglomerate in different industries (usually with property development in the portfolio) elevates its leader. With our dependence on external status symbols, like cars and residences, corporate metrics like revenues, market cap, profits, leverage ratios, or employment levels are disregarded. It’s enough for a company to be described as among the top 1,000 in the country for its CEO’s corporate profile to rise and be accorded celebrity status. When introduced to strangers, it is his business holdings that are mentioned. (He heads an online gambling organization that rakes in millions in cash every day.)
One criterion for celebrity status is ubiquity. A business with many branches in different parts of the country qualifies. Thus, the owner of a food chain or a line of apparel featured on big billboards (with Korean celebrities) can be more famous than an investment banker or the CEO of a publicly listed mining company.
Moguls can be accompanied by eye candy, usually in a different profession like interior decoration. If a celebrity partner is seen in online posts accompanying a mogul (she is just a business partner), even movie reporters jump into the fray to get set up for future cyber libel charges with their speculations.
Maybe because business achievements like increasing shareholder value by 60% are too abstract for celebrity hounds to appreciate, it’s what the CEO can buy, whether whole office buildings or private jets, that seem to make an impression. Fawning articles by the non-business media concentrate on lifestyle attributes. Road rage incidents do not qualify, even when driving a Benz.
Advocacy is becoming an important part of the CEO brand. Prevention of child abuse, protecting an endangered species (old employees), fighting malnutrition among young children, and mass weddings of live-in couples are already taken.
Even young tycoons have blazed celebrity niches when buying into a media company in the open market to be the second largest stockholder. This celebrity game can be expensive. It also elicits a negative reaction from the CEO’s stockholders.
It is perhaps a general lack of economic literacy in media that often consigns the ordinary CEO to obscurity except for those in the know. The same attributes that attach to politicians, although for them luxurious living is no longer something to flaunt — Sure, I get to wear all these expensive clothes to attend wakes.
In the case of entertainers, a new mansion is routinely posted in a virtual tour — this door was made by a famous artist. There is even reference to childhood as an informal settler bathing in the public pumping area — look where I am now.
Even celebrity features and interviews on the net have now expanded coverage to corporate CEOs. Opening shots, using black and white shadings, can feature a brooding expression on the CEO’s face (Q2 numbers were terrible) to project a troubled soul.
Business details on the executive, except perhaps for his long working hours and constant foreign trips in his own plane, have nothing to do with success in business. No mention is made of his cost-cutting efforts, succession planning, and the introduction of a paperless office — except in toilets.
Even for celebrities, CEO stories seldom deal with the business side — how the boss grew the business and increased the company’s revenues through targeted marketing strategies including the acquisition of failing companies that were rehabilitated. Being a good employer and increasing the company’s market cap, improved return on investment and a good business strategy should be the criteria for a business reputation.
What celebrity status finds more interesting is what the boss does outside of work which usually leads to the CEO’s coverage and personal preoccupation… and post-occupation.
Tony Samson is chairman and CEO of TOUCH xda
