If the facts don't align with your vision, figure out a different vision.
A good CEO who is very strong on vision will build a team that keeps him in check by having balancing strengths. But narcissists don't like balance. So they build teams that let them do what they want. And when they hire somebody who isn't an enabler, that person soon ends up gone one way or another. And it's not just CEOs. You can find a good example of this in recent US politics.
If your CEO is delusional, it's usually possible to reign him or her in... From what I understand, Neumann had some special votes that basically allowed him to fire the board at any point.
I imagine that anyone with a pragmatic mindset willing to ask "wait, but the numbers are..." was pushed out of the picture either explicitly or implicitly by the power imbalance.
https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/9/24/20882133/wework-adam-ne...
Thanks for the tip! I didn't realize that.
Vision is fine but cold, hard facts are essential too. If you let your vision get the better of you and you ignore the facts then you're on the path to self destruction.
If those two factors are strong (say, cultural reasons), a lot of red flags can fall by the wayside.
This problem is fed by the fact that they surround themselves with yes men, who only benefit by feeding the beast, until the beast eats itself.
It's called Michael Jackson Syndrome.
The best part: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAeEpbtHDPw
Everyone has their own peculiar mental model of reality, sometimes more optimistic, sometimes more pessimistic, almost always with strange boundaries on the thinkable universe.
I estimate this is how the majority of bad financial situations happen, whether untenable mortgages, huge credit card bills, excessive student debt, etc.
People are usually not fundamentally stupid or poor decision makers, but they do usually ignore uncomfortable thoughts.
It's easy for that to happen to one person; it's more surprising when it happens to dozens of people.
So in some sense I think asking what Adam Neumann and Elizabeth Holmes really believe is a category error. Knowing the truth makes lying really hard. If you spend a lot of time figuring out what's true, that builds mental habits that make lying feel bad. But if mostly ignore "true", then it's much easier to focus only on what Nixon's press secretary called the "operative statement" [1]. For narcissist CEOs, I think they treat the objective truth like a child sometimes treats a scary closet: if they never look at it or think about it, it's not a problem.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/16/weekinreview/the-nation-t...