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The Conference Board Review® Article
Fat Cats
In the corner office, size matters.
By James Krohe Jr.
James Krohe Jr. is a Chicago-area writer and editor. His most recent article was "Money changes Everything," the Nov/Dec 2007 cover story.
Fat is much on the mind of the engaged CEO these days. If he runs a food firm, obesity looms as a product-liability threat. If she runs a company researching weight-loss drugs, obesity is a market opportunity. For all kinds of companies, severe overweight drags worker productivity down and pushes healthcare costs up.
But more than a few CEOs confront the obesity issue not on their desktops but in their mirrors. "It's about self-image," says personal-growth and wellness coach Mary Liz Murphy about the concerns of the executives and senior managers with whom she works. "I'm surprised by how much it bothers them."
This concern for the top guys' own bottom lines is odd. The big men (and the occasional woman) who lead our biggest businesses aren't, physically speaking. When people talk about how CEOs throw their weight around, it isn't after watching them step onto an elevator. But a few unwanted pounds can induce something like panic in the most powerful. As a class, senior executives fear fat for what they assume it signifies about their characters and habits to their co-workers. Their hopes for promotion outside the company, and for survival against rivals within it, stand at risk from betrayal by their own bodies.
The Portly Banker Has RetiredThe size and shape of our leaders of industry has waxed and waned. The fabled capitalists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tended to be substantial men in every sense. The business elites' "dignified (leisurely) bearing and portly presence" (to quote Thorstein Veblen) trumpeted their superior material status in the flesh. If the big businessman was troubled by his weight, it was because he did not have enough of it.
There were exceptions. John D. Rockefeller — raised by fiercely puritanical Baptists and thus schooled from youth in self-denial — was lean as a rail. On his seventy-seventh birthday, the still-hearty oil king offered the world advice that would not sound strange coming from a cardiologist today: "Don't strive for overweight," he warned; avoid stress (he used the word "worry"); eat food that is nutritious rather than appetizing; get plenty of exercise and sleep. His devotion to such a regimen would make him a paragon in our health-conscious era, but the oil king's self-imposed thinness was then held against him by a press and public who saw in it evidence of a cold, even slightly inhuman nature.
The fat cats of legend purred happily into the twentieth century. In 1980, Marilyn Moon, then a young economist out of Wisconsin, correlated data on the height and weight of thousands of Americans with their incomes. She and her colleagues found that heavier men (of all races) earned more than women of any weight (that was to be expected) and slightly out-earned slimmer men. Moon and her colleagues hypothesized what they called a "portly banker effect" to explain the finding. The phrase was inspired, she says, by her father, who jokingly called the section of the local men's store where he bought his suits the portly-banker section.
The Depression made overweight more disreputable than enviable. Then World War II, when so many future CEOs had been (at least for a time) lean, mean fighting machines, reshaped not only the nation's future CEOs but its collective notions of what a corporate soldier should look like. In the 1960s and '70s, overweight became a health issue in executive suites after the hard-driving Type A personality became the poster boy for cardiovascular health. By the 1980s, publishers were getting fat selling anxious excess books such as Rx Executive Diet: Sensible Nutrition for Today's Health-Conscious Executives.
Moon, who today is director of the Health Program of the American Institutes for Research, notes that the portly-banker model is no longer an ideal among executives. That change can be confirmed with a glance at the passengers in any flight's business-class section. These days, that part of the airplane has the widest seats and the least need for them.
Comments? Write a letter to the editor.
Return to the May/June 2008 The Conference Board Review® issue.
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