Beware The Superstar CEO

Jim Collins has detailed the dangers of superstar CEO in his excellent management book Good to Great.

Now a new study by Ulrike Malmendier of Stanford and Geoffrey Tate of Wharton provides a ton of color and interesting detail around this phenomenon.  They find that superstar CEOs tend to have subpar performance (more than would be expected from mere mean-reversion), and that the worst situations are those where governance is weak.  These guys are serious - their regressions include a variable for whether the CEO was writing a book at the time!

Someone should cross-reference this with the social/sustainability ratings.  I've beaten this to death already, but I'll bet that superstar CEOs underperform on social as well as financial metrics.