At a company I once worked for, our COO was a brilliant engineer. He had been a GE vice president under Jack Welch, with technical achievements that genuinely commanded respect. When he spoke about engineering or operations, he was usually right. But he rarely stopped there. He felt the need to offer pronouncements on politics, on HR, on marketing, on legal matters, and finance—fields in which other senior people had far deeper expertise. He would overrule seasoned professionals not because he had better data, but because he believed his judgment was superior everywhere. I remember thinking at the time: is this a known phenomenon, or just a quirk of one individual?
What Is This Behavior Called?
It turns out there are names for it. Organizational psychologists and leadership scholars have been studying this pattern for decades, and several overlapping terms capture different facets of it:
- Hubris Syndrome – A leader’s acquired overconfidence in their own judgment, described by Owen & Davidson (Brain, 2009), often emerging after success and power.
- The Overconfidence Effect – Documented by Fischhoff and colleagues (1977), even genuine experts routinely overestimate their knowledge when moving into unfamiliar domains.
- The Halo Effect – As Rosenzweig (2007) explains, we tend to assume someone excellent in one area must be excellent in all areas—and they often start to believe it themselves.
- The Expert’s Curse – As explored in Organization Science (Dane & Pratt, 2007), deep expertise can lead to rigid thinking and a failure to see the limits of one’s own knowledge.
Different labels, same pattern: success in one area creates the illusion that your judgment is universally superior. And when that illusion goes unchecked, it can cause damage in fields far outside your expertise.
Leadership Overreach Through History
What fascinates me is that this isn’t a modern discovery. Leaders and thinkers have been warning about it for thousands of years, across civilizations. Here are some of those voices, in rough chronological order:
⚒️ Babylon, c. 2100 BCE
In The Epic of Gilgamesh, the citizens of Uruk complain about their king—brilliant, strong, and utterly overreaching:
“He leaves not the son to his father, nor the maid to the warrior, nor the wife to her husband.”
—The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet I
A king so confident in his own power that no sphere of life is beyond his intrusion.
🌄 Persia, c. 370 BCE
In Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, drawing on Persian ideals of leadership, Cyrus the Great is praised not for overreach but for restraint:
“He would not think himself wise in matters of which he had no knowledge.”
—Cyropaedia I.6.22
🕉 India, c. 400 BCE – 400 CE
The Mahabharata warns that knowledge without humility is hollow:
“Knowledge without humility is like a tree full of flowers but no fruit.”
—Mahabharata, Shanti Parva
📖 China, c. 475–221 BCE
In the Analects, Confucius defines true knowledge not as breadth but as honesty about one’s limits:
“When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it—this is knowledge.”
—Analects 2:17
🐸 China, c. 300 BCE
Zhuangzi offers a metaphor that has lasted millennia:
“A frog in a well cannot conceive of the sea.”
—Zhuangzi, Chapter 17
🇬🇷 Greece, c. 399 BCE
In Plato’s Apology, Socrates explains why he questioned the poets, craftsmen, and politicians of Athens:
“The poets think they know all sorts of things, even though they do not.”
—Plato, Apology 22a–23b
🇬🇷 Greece, c. 330 BCE
Aristotle observed the same tendency in Rhetoric:
“Those with reputation in one art are believed in all others.”
—Aristotle, Rhetoric 1356a
📌 A Pattern Through Time
From the kings of Uruk to modern C‑suites, from Confucius to Aristotle, we see the same caution: success in one area does not grant you omniscience. The leaders who endure are those who know where their expertise ends and where to listen to others. The ones who do not? History tends to remember them less kindly.
As I think back to that COO—brilliant, accomplished, and convinced his insight was universal—I see him standing in a long line of frogs who could not imagine the sea.
A Deeper Dive into Lord David Owen’s 14 Attributes of Hubris Syndrome
A description of the 14 attributes and some remedial actions you can take.