Institutional Imperative as CEO Kryptonite

"Warren Buffett looked back on his first twenty-five years as a CEO and concluded that the most important and surprising lesson from his career to date was the discovery of a mysterious force, the corporate equivalent of teenage peer pressure, that impelled CEOs to imitate the actions of their peers. He dubbed this powerful force the institutional imperative and noted that it was nearly ubiquitous, warning that effective CEOs needed to find some way to tune it out."

"The CEOs in this book all managed to avoid the insidious influence of this powerful imperative. How? They found an antidote in a shared managerial philosophy, a worldview that pervaded their organizations and cultures and drove their operating and capital allocating decisions."

"This outsider approach, whether in a local business or a large corporate boardroom, doesn’t seem that complicated; so why don’t more people follow it? The answer is that it’s harder than it looks. It’s not easy to diverge from your peers, to ignore the institutional imperative, and in many ways the business world is like a high school cafeteria clouded by peer pressure."