…Norwegians call stormannsgalskap, the madness of great men.

Stormannsgalskap is particularly common among media barons, not least because they frequently blur the line between reporting reality and shaping it. William Randolph Hearst is widely suspected of stirring up the Spanish-American war to give his papers something to report. Lord Beaverbrook regarded himself as a kingmaker, literally so in the case of George VI. These men’s megalomania was captured in two masterworks: Orson Welles’s film “Citizen Kane” and Evelyn Waugh’s novel “Scoop”.

The ugly side of these entrepreneurs is often just as important to their success as their admirable side. You cannot reshape an industry without extraordinary confidence in your own rightness. And it is hard to build a great company from scratch without what Mr Tedlow dubs “the imperialism of the soul”. But these negative qualities often end up undermining the empires that they helped to create. Ford’s stubbornness led him to mass-produce cars before there were many roads for people to drive them on. But it later blinded him to the fact that General Motors was beating him by giving consumers more choice. Mr Milken’s scorn for the way things had always been done allowed him to revolutionise financial markets. Yet it also blinded him to the fact that he was breaking the law. The bad side of great bad businessmen usually gets worse with age. They surround themselves with yes-men and family members (Mr Murdoch currently has two children working for his company). They become fixated on their earlier successes. Many start to believe that they are invulnerable even as their mortal powers begin to fade.

Continue Reading @ The Economist (H/T Ben!)

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