The Hubris Equation
Many leaders fall because of it. Some resist it. Everyone faces it.
Two of the top tech leaders in recent months have fallen out of grace; one took over one of the most iconic brands in the world, the other built the fastest rising one. On many measures they have made it on the wealth equation. But what they could have gone down in history for millennia as iconic leaders, their actions in recent times stole that mantle from them. This is not about them. It is about the disease that inflicts so many leaders at their peak.
I’ll be honest having climbed that ladder myself, I came very close to falling for it too. What makes it so devious is the timing. It doesn’t come for you when you’re struggling. It comes on the ascent, sitting quietly on your shoulder, waiting.
Perhaps that’s just the fundamental nature of being human. We all love adulation, we all want to be liked. And when the recognition finally comes, it feels earned. That’s precisely what makes hubris so dangerous. It arrives wearing the face of success.
How It Starts and How It Spreads
Here is what I have noticed about the leaders who rise well. At the beginning, almost all of them carry the same three things in rough balance:
Confidence : the courage to take calculated risk, to back their own conviction when others hesitate.
Risk Awareness : the discipline to read the downside, to not confuse momentum with invincibility.
Humility : the openness to be corrected, to update, to know what they don’t know.
The formula works beautifully on the way up. You take bold moves, you get feedback, you adjust. You build trust because people see you listening. You build results because the listening sharpens the decisions.
Then success arrives. Sustained, visible, compounding success. And almost without anyone noticing, including the leader, the team around them shifts. The candid voices get replaced by familiar ones. The close-knit circle becomes an echo chamber. Meetings get easier. Nobody pushes back the way they used to.
The confidence doesn’t change. The risk-taking doesn’t change. The humility just quietly disappears.
And this is where the equation breaks.
The Equation
Hubris = Confidence ÷ (Humility × Risk Awareness)
Confidence is necessary. It is the numerator. Without it, nothing gets built. But confidence inflates the outcome when the denominator collapses.
Humility and Risk Awareness sit in the denominator multiplied together, not added. Which means if either one goes to zero, the denominator goes to zero. And when the denominator is zero, the output is not just large. It is infinite. Uncontrollable. Catastrophic.
This is not a soft framework. It is mathematics.
Two Lives of the Same Man
The clearest proof I know is Steve Jobs, not one Steve Jobs, but two.
In 1983, he launched the Apple Lisa at $9,995. No software ecosystem. No real understanding of what corporate buyers needed. Enormous confidence. Zero risk awareness about pricing and market readiness. Near-zero humility toward the engineers and customers who tried to tell him otherwise. The Lisa failed. So did NeXT, the company he built after Apple’s board fired him.
Then came eleven years in the wilderness. Building NeXT humbled him — technically brilliant, commercially struggling. Running Pixar humbled him differently — he had to collaborate with creative people who would not simply comply. He had to learn to listen, to shape ideas rather than impose them. He had to eat dirt and start over.
When he returned to Apple in 1997, the confidence was unchanged. The denominator had been rebuilt. The equation balanced. The rest is the iPhone.
Same man. Same volcanic energy. Completely different architecture inside.
The pattern repeats everywhere you look. Napoleon entering Russia in 1812, his advisors warned him, the history of Russian winters warned him, and he dismissed both because thirty campaigns of winning had eroded his risk awareness to nothing. Six hundred thousand men entered. Fewer than one hundred thousand returned. Kodak’s own engineers invented the digital camera in 1975. Leadership buried it. They filed for bankruptcy in 2012. Not for lack of intelligence for lack of a functioning denominator.
Travis Kalanick (Uber): Kalanick built Uber into a $70 billion company on sheer aggressive confidence. But the same denominator that got him there had quietly emptied, he dismissed legal risks, ignored HR warnings about a toxic culture, and surrounded himself with people who validated rather than challenged. When the board finally removed him in 2017, it wasn’t a sudden fall. It was the inevitable conclusion of years of unchecked hubris accumulating inside a shrinking feedback loop.
Adam Neumann (WeWork): Neumann’s confidence was genuinely magnetic, he convinced SoftBank to pour in over $10 billion. But his humility toward financial reality was nonexistent. Every WeWork location lost money at scale, yet he kept expanding as though momentum was the same thing as a business model. When the IPO collapsed in 2019, it wasn’t the market that failed him. The denominator had been zero for years. The market just finally looked.
“Kalanick and Neumann didn’t lose the plot suddenly they lost the denominator gradually, one unchallenged decision at a time.”
Three Things That Actually Help
I have thought about this a long time, from my own journey, from watching leaders around me, from the two people on my own team who made my leadership meetings the most uncomfortable rooms I regularly sat in. They challenged my decisions openly, sometimes in front of others. There were moments I resented it.
They are also the reason I did not lose my footing.
So here is what I think actually works, not theory, but practice.
1. Keep people around you who are still permitted to tell you that you are wrong.
Not people who agree slowly, or who push back gently in private. People who can say it clearly, in the room, and know you will not punish them for it. This has to be a deliberate structural choice, because the natural drift of success is toward people who know how you operate and make the environment more comfortable. Comfortable is the enemy.
2. Build a reflection practice quarterly at minimum.
Not a performance review. A genuine reckoning. Where am I making good decisions and where am I not? Where have I stopped listening? Where is my confidence outrunning my evidence? The leaders who do this who sit with the discomfort of honest self-assessment are the ones who stay sharp. The ones who skip it are the ones who show up in case studies.
3. Go to the frontline. Intentionally. Repeatedly.
Not a walk-through. Not a town hall. Real time in the trenches with junior employees, with customers at ground level, with the people furthest from the executive floor. This does two things simultaneously: it shows you the actual state of the business, which is always more complicated than your dashboard suggests, and it reminds you where you came from. Both are essential. The higher you climb, the more deliberately you have to engineer your own contact with reality.
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The antidote to hubris is not less confidence. It is a stronger denominator.
The leaders I have most respected across thirty years and thirty countries are not the ones who never felt the pull of hubris. They all felt it. What separated them was the architecture they had built to hold themselves when the pull came.
Build the denominator before you need it. Because by the time you realize you need it, it is usually already too late.
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If you are a leader at any level, in any organization, how are you keeping hubris at bay?