Death and the Executive: Encounters with the ‘Stealth’ Motivator

March 8, 2014 Leave a comment

Death and the Executive: Encounters with the ‘Stealth’ Motivator

Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries 

INSEAD – Entrepreneurship and Family Enterprise
January 30, 2014
INSEAD Working Paper No. 2014/11/EFE

Abstract: 
Death anxiety is a primary motivational force that drives much of our behavior. It puts our defenses on high alert, and we make strenuous efforts to repress or deny the unwelcome truth of our inevitable end. The way each of us denies death not only affects life in its broadest sense but also influences the way we behave in organizations. Death anxiety underlies much executive behavior and action. However, traditional motivational theories do not acknowledge the influence of death anxiety on our behavior. Although they attempt to help us better understand employee motivation, they are not sufficiently inclusive. This article takes a clinical lens to explore death anxiety as a motivational force, how it affects behavior in organizations, and how we metabolize the feelings death evokes. In addition, I examine the various ways we deal with our knowledge of death. Some of us go into overdrive in trying to suppress it, while others fall into a state of resignation and depression. To deal with the ultimate narcissistic injury that death represents, we resort to a variety of immortality strategies to create permanent or enduring meaning. Furthermore, from an organizational perspective, three maladaptive responses to death anxiety are explored: the manic defense, succession issues, and the edifice complex.

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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