Published on: April 7, 2025 at 6:07 pm
Some CEOs achieve celebrity through hard work, and some have celebrity thrust upon them. Some become celebrities through pure dumb luck—combined with the media’s propensity to lionize CEOs.
Academy of Management Scholar Tim Pollock of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville said that he’s done research on how, why, and who becomes an A-list celebrity versus a B- or C-list celebrity.
“We looked at two different factors: push and pull,” Pollock said. “Push factors would be the CEO trying to get media attention, making themselves available, putting themselves out there, having lots of quotes in the press releases, articles, and elsewhere, being very self-focused in a way that that makes them easy for the media to use and make them heroes.
“Pull factors made the CEO attractive to the media as a story, whether or not they were trying to push themselves into the limelight, and so we found that demographically distinct CEOs—if they were someone other than a white male, essentially—then that could have an effect,” he said. “Also, strategic non-conformity is another pull factor—their firm engaged in strategic actions that were leading the companies in ways that were different than the industry’s norm.
“This makes them stand out, makes them newsworthy, and allows the media to construct stories around these behaviors that we call ‘dramatized realities,’ so the press basically tells the truth, but they tell the story in a way that’s going to make it interesting and engaging for readers.”
Journalists often paint either a CEO or a company as the hero, praising them for everything that went right, even if success was due to luck or factors out of their control.
“The press often accords CEOs responsibility for all kinds of things that one person or one company couldn’t possibly do by themselves,” Pollock said. “The CEO gets credited for all kinds of stuff that it takes a team of people within the organization and elsewhere to actually pull off, or that they may not even be responsible for, but they get credit for, because it makes a great story.
“We like to see individuals as heroes in our narratives, as especially as Americans,” he said. “So, this is the kind of thing you see happen.”
