Welcome to the CEO society

One of the best known scenes from Oliver Stone's 1987 blockbuster movie Wall Street occurs when Gordon Gecko addresses the Teldar Paper shareholders meeting. With slicked back hair, a steely gaze and a half-cocked frown Gecko delivers a portentous sermon on how business should work. "I am not a destroyer of companies", he states, "I am a liberator of them." For Gecko it is ruthless competition that is the font of both wealth and freedom. Gecko then delivers the film's most famous line: "the point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed – for lack of a better word – is good". The belief, and indeed the value that he propounds is that human flourishing, in all of its possible domains, results from the avaricious endeavours of self-seeking individualists. To put it more simply, the only sure path to progress is to allow the winners to take all and for everyone else to aspire to be like them.

Looking back some thirty years later, it feels as though this film was chronicling a still adolescent neoliberalism, while presaging the ruthlessness of the adult to come. If we believe the credo that life imitates art, then we are living through a particularly pernicious imitation right now. This was a film that foreshadowed a world where everything was permissible as long as it was profitable. It was difficult then to even imagine how nefarious this grown-up would turn out to be, maturing into a global society marked by widening inequality, lack of sustainable development and the threat of an environmental apocalypse. That difficulty no longer exists. In our current age, the corporate ethos that Gecko epitomised has spread to almost all areas of human existence. As contemporary political scientist Wendy Brown describes it, even dimensions of life that are not wealth generating, for example learning, dating or exercise, are now construed in market terms, controlled through market metrics, and administered through market methods. Brown contends that

Today, market actors – from individuals to firms, universities to states, restaurants to magazines – are more often concerned with their speculatively determined value, their ratings and rankings that shape future value, than with immediate profit. All are tasked with enhancing present and future value through self-investments that in turn attract investors. Financialised market conduct entails increasing or maintaining one's ratings, whether through blog hits, retweets, Yelp stars, college rankings, or Moody's bond ratings.

Even after a catastrophic financial crisis and mountains of evidence that business executives and Wall Street operators do more social harm than economic good, their mantra of competition, efficiency and profiteering continue to hold sway. With this, the CEO has emerged as the quintessential hero of our times.

It is what Gecko says immediately after the renowned 'greed is good' line that holds a special prescience for the themes explored in this book. It is at this point that he broadens the ambit of what he sees as greed's moral value. His conviction is that the "upward surge of mankind" that greed has made happen is not limited to business. The monologue ends: "greed – you mark my words – will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA". The crowd applauds. What Oliver Stone both pointed to, and to a large extent foretold, through Gecko's hardnosed and moralistic competitiveness is how, in the context of neoliberalism, the corporation has become the ideal model for aspects of human enterprise all the way up to and including democratic government. Fast-forwarding to the late 2010s Stone's dystopian image of corporate greed as an idealised future seems to have come to fruition, with corporations having not just massively expanded in terms of their size and global reach, but also having become the model form of organising beyond compare.

It is the case today that, as a consequence of neoliberalism, corporate managerialism is a socially dominant value. In this sense, we can understand neoliberalism as the extension of market-based values to all dimensions of human endeavour. With neoliberalism comes managerialism, such that the management of market-based organisations is established as the preferred way to manage all other types of organisation as well. In this society all forms of human activity can be seen as analogous to corporate activity, with the players involved equivalent to businesses and their 'stakeholders'. In ancient spheres oflife once thought ofas being antithetical to business, corporate cultures, language and practices have taken hold. In universities, for example, students are now thought of as customers, courses are products, and the whole success of the institution has become newly reliant on corporate strategy, market rivalry, competitive positioning and branding. While this has become a well-supported means for universities to fill their coffers at the expense of student debt, not all agree. Indeed, in 2014 the International Student Movement (ISM) held a global week of action under the slogan 'we are students, not customers'. The point was to protest at the commercialisation of universities and promote the value of free education.

The management of public services from post offices, to local government, to libraries (that is, the ones that have not yet been privatised) have also suffered. Corporate management techniques have been brought in on the back of a narrative of progress that deems this approach to have the twin qualities of superiority and inevitability. The same goes for non-profit organisations, non-governmental organisations, charities, churches and community organisations. This all amounts to a managerialist domination whereby the means through which both the economy and society are run should "mirror the way that corporations are managed".

There seems no limit to this fantastic enthusiasm for CEOs and their ways of getting things done. Self-styled American executive coach Larry Julian has even gone so far as to claim 'God is my CEO'. In his book of that title, Julian brings his Christian deity into the boardroom, showing that following his principles offaith and becoming a "godly leader" can yield "tangible outcomes" such as "financial success, increased sales, reduced costs, productivity improvements, etc." Julian's Christian God is not the one who banished the merchants and money dealers from the temple, but a modernised version who preaches business from the pulpit as some kind of holy CEO, newly installed at the apex of the trinity. This is a worldwide phenomenon. In Guangzhou, China, children as young as three are being sent to schools so that they can take CEO classes. Emblazoned on a poster outside one such school was the slogan 'Hand us a kid, we give you back a future leader'; an apparent modern-day corporate reformulation of the Jesuit slogan 'give me...