There are few jobs with less appeal than being the chief executive of a big company. The work is intolerably stressful. It is lonely. You never see your children. You spend far too much time breathing stale air in a pressurised cabin 36,000 feet up. And it generally ends in big, humiliating failure.
Johnson & Johnson, whose Human Performance Institute has spent more than 30 years studying the behaviour of athletes and other fanatics, has come up with a way of making the job manageable: a $100,000 anti-burnout programme. The CEO is packed off to the Mayo clinic for a few days during which their insides are methodically prodded and X-rayed. Then three experts are called in — a dietitian, a physiologist and a coach — who over the next nine months interview the executives’ families, poke around in their fridges, then tell them what to eat, how much to exercise and how to change their characters. Or, as the company puts it on its website: “The Premier Coaching Team leverages holistic Physical, Mental, and Emotional Analyses to create highly personalised action plans.”
I have no doubt Premier Executive Leadership ™ will be in great demand. I once read that 40 per cent of CEOs quit or are fired in the first 18 months. Executive burnout is not only a downer for the person but for shareholders too. According to research by Strategy&, a CEO resignation at one of the world’s largest companies can knock its value by $1.8bn. Compared with that a $100,000 insurance policy seems like a cheap solution.