Signals Frugal CEOs Send

It starts with the comparison of reality TV in the US and South Korea. Despite the desire to stay focused, a great weakness of mine is TV. I’m the kind of person who can watch 10 hours of TV without a break…and stopped counting how many reruns of Friends I’ve seen after the 13th time.

Now that I’ve lost some of your respect and that of my own, I think I’ve set the stage for the thoughts today.

There are a number of producers I like to follow. Usually, anything Armando Ianucci or Michael Shur produces I will trust in and give it a whirl. If David Attenborough is narrating a documentary, I will give it a whirl too. For reality TV, anything Na Young Suk produces in South Korea I shall watch.

The oddity is that I watch Western dramas but not their reality shows while the inverse is true for South Korean shows. Naturally, I listened to a lecture producer Na gave. He starts the lecture by asking no one to upload it because he’s going to lay out some hard truths but thankfully one person didn’t listen. The lecture I linked is in Korean so I don’t know if Google can help you there.

But, one thing he points out is the difference between US and S.Korean reality shows. He notes how the US audience responds very well to extravagance and ‘bigger than life’ shows. Like the rappers showing off bling and big yachts etc… Koreans respond very negatively to that and there are some cultural nuances there. It’s distasteful. Korean reality shows focus on the reverse, to show celebrities going through grueling experiences that average or below-average people would experience.

This is why you’ll see the famous Black Pink or Big Bang folks go through painful farm labour, have to sleep on muddy fields, etc…. You’d never see Beyonce do that here but the more famous you are…the more you’ll do these ‘humanizing’ shows in Korea.

Then I thought about CEOs.

Some are notoriously frugal. There’s the Jeff Bezos driving his 1996 Honda long after he became a billionaire. Mark Leonard only stopped riding economy class a few years ago and he said he would pay with his own money and not use the company’s for the unnecessary luxury. There is the office of AB-Inbev where it reminds one of the dull offices in The Office and the furniture looks like it was all picked out of the dumpster somewhere.

There’s also the view of simplicity. Jobs and Zuckerberg wearing the same clothes that make them look rather ordinary to everyone. Mike Cannon-Brookes takes the bus to the Atlassian HQ. Bruce Flatt lives in some townhouse in Yorkville despite Brookfield owning every swanky real estate out there.

I think this normalcy would cite a strong signal of relatability, if not setting a ceiling on attitudes.

When the leader of your company lives a certain way…one that makes them seem closer to the average employee’s living conditions….it probably creates a closeness. I’d imagine this would lead to a kind of loyalty because people like familiarity and similarity. But the CEO leads the company so there is still a sense of hierarchical respect.

But when the CEO presents a ‘larger than life’ living… it only makes sense that there will be distance. The CEO becomes closer to some god-like entity. Kind of like the celebrity effect one sees in US reality shows.

This sense of leadership frugality is one of the traits many value investors look for in management. It signals signs of financial responsibility and someone who isn’t obsessed with external praise. Something of a stoic and grounded individual.

And this probably sets the ceiling in regards to compensation since most executives won’t see themselves being paid materially more than the CEO and overall organizational spending.

I also think there’s that humility factor that breeds respect. The able that doesn’t. Like the billionaire hedge fund manager who still drives a pick-up truck (I’m blanking on who it was…might’ve been David Tepper?), it’s knowing that the billionaire leaders act and live normally as everyone else does.

I honestly think this makes them more likable and that’s an often underestimated thing about working for someone. I think the same can be said about being a fan of celebrities. I’d guess that Korean celebrities have more die-hard fans than the ones in the US does because of how many are portrayed through reality TV. It breeds familiarity and that is stronger when they see frugality in how they live their lives.

Just like how lavish CEOs end up having (either through attraction or evolution) managers who also strive to live lavishly, the opposite seems true for the other end. The leader frames the culture and that culture frames the individual. Like it or not, environments matter.

Though it seems to come up sometimes, society would be better served seeing news about how frugal some CEOs are compared to how lavishly spending ones.