Believe it or not, one thing that predicts how well a CEO's company performs is the width of his face, according to Elaine M. Wong at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and her colleagues. CEOs with wider faces, like Herb Kelleher, the former CEO of Southwest Airlines, have better-performing companies than CEOs like Dick Fuld, the long-faced final CEO of Lehman Brothers - correlation/causation, according to a new study which will be published in Psychological Science in October, which is apparently only slightly above Psychology Today in its willingness to publish anything.
Obviously, no real CEO is going to talk to these people when they discover the kooky premise of this research, so they have to do it in indirect ways. "CEOs and top executives don't typically have time to talk with researchers or take batteries of tests," she says. "Our research has primarily been at a distance."
Looking at pictures is a fine substitute, according to Wong and her colleagues, Margaret E. Ormiston of London Business School and Michael P. Haselhuhn of UWM.
Looking at faces isn't as crazy as it might sound, they insist, relying for that belief on previous studies which claimed that the ratio of face width to face height is correlated with aggression. That evidence? Hockey players with wider faces spend more time in the penalty box for fighting and, in a statement worthy of Satoshi Kanazawa, they say men with higher facial width are seen as less trustworthy.
Though they say it has benefits, because apparently men with wider faces also fight a lot so they are seen as more 'powerful'.
"Most of these are seen as negative things, but power can have some positive effects," Wong says. People who feel powerful tend to look at the big picture rather than focusing on small details and are also better at staying on task. She and her colleagues thought that feeling of power might also be correlated with a company's financial performance.
They based their rigorous conclusion on photos of 55 male CEOs of publicly-traded Fortune 500 organizations. They only used men because this relationship between face shape and behavior has only been found to apply to men - of course; they believe that must have something to do with testosterone levels. They also gathered information on the companies' financial performance and analyzed shareholder letters to get a sense of the kind of thinking that goes on at those companies.
CEOs with a wider face, relative to the face's height, had much better firm financial performance than CEOs who had narrower faces. "In our sample, the CEOs with the higher facial ratios actually achieved significantly greater firm financial performance than CEOs with the lower facial ratios," Wong says.
Don't run out and invest in wide-faced CEOs' companies, though - as if you were reading any of this without laughing - Wong and her colleagues also found that the way the top management team thinks, as reflected in their writings, can get in the way of this effect. Teams that take a simplistic view of the world, in which everything is black and white, are thought to be more deferential to authority; in these companies, the CEO's face shape is more important.