The Age of Individualism—and Its Unseen Costs

Play Time: 24 mins

Read Time: 2 mins

In the first part of a two-part Founding Fuel Conversation, John Kay, founding director, Oxford Said Business School, in conversation with Upamanyu Bhattacharya, strategic consultant and visiting professor of retail at SPJIMR, draws on insights from his acclaimed books Greed is Dead (co-authored with Paul Collier) and The Corporation in the 21st Century. Kay traces the intellectual roots and cultural appeal of individualism—from business schools and CEO hero worship to the dominance of shareholder value. He discusses how this worldview has reshaped corporations like Boeing and GE, hollowed out professionalism in management, and created political paradoxes where populist leaders claim to fight elites but ally with them instead.

Key Takeaways

• Iconic leadership is a myth—teams build lasting firms. Although charismatic CEOs are celebrated, as seen with Jack Welch at General Electric (GE), business success is actually rooted in high-performing teams. Welch’s focus on shareholder value made him a management icon, but GE’s later decline illustrates the pitfalls of “great man” leadership.

• Shareholder value trumped professionalism. Since the 1970s, a shift toward neoliberal ideas led to the prioritization of shareholder returns over the professional management ethos of earlier decades, reshaping corporate cultures and diminishing teamwork.

• Boeing as a cautionary tale. Boeing was once an engineering powerhouse where teams aimed to “eat, sleep, and breathe” aeronautics, delivering innovations like the 737 and 747. With the McDonnell Douglas merger, a shift to financial and shareholder value thinking undermined engineering priorities, culminating in the 737 MAX crisis—a stark lesson on losing purpose and the danger of financialization.

• Populism feeds on inequality—but rarely solves it. Paradoxically, populist politicians promise to fight elite-driven inequality, yet typically ally with corporations, deepening divisions instead of bridging them. These populist leaders don't really have much in the way of ideology, but are the focus for the resentment and anger of a lot of people who feel neglected by the traditional political parties, and are not very happy with the way the world has been run by an educated middle class of people like us.

• Tech legends aren’t invincible. They rise—and fall in fast-evolving markets. The dominance of IBM in the 1980s seemed unassailable, yet it faded. Today’s tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Apple are considered central, but their longevity is uncertain. Apple nearly failed multiple times before its iPhone breakthrough. Google and Facebook are probably companies of the last decade.

• Big tech using customer data isn’t a concern. Google has a great deal of information about me; I'm not sure I care. If I get ads that are more relevant to me, that’s a rather good thing. I would be worried if some of the unpleasant state actors were able to get in using this kind of information. But I don't see much sign of that yet. 

• Communitarianism was a counterbalance to individualism. The communitarian point is to say that our societies work effectively, mostly as a result of institutions that are somewhere in between the individual and the state—the universities, churches, sports clubs. Businesses too thrive when teams of people working together.

Watch Part 2 here