Why write a novel about a narcissistic CEO? Because a narcissistic leader who would fight any feedback report can still recognise himself in a story. Fiction gets past the armour: there is no messenger to shoot. Wahlberg, my business novel about CEO Dirk Wahlberg, has been handed to more real executives by more coaches, spouses and board members than I will ever have sessions for, and it works for exactly that reason.
Years before Let’s Talk Leadership, before the research with Martin Appelo that became Red de Alfawolf, I wrote a novel. Wahlberg: Het verhaal van een CEO follows Dirk Wahlberg, chief executive of a document-security firm he built from fifty people into a market leader: driven, visionary, appallingly rude, and entirely convinced that the problem is everyone else. Readers regularly ask which of my clients he is based on. All of them; none of them; that is what fiction is for. What I did not anticipate was the book’s afterlife as an instrument. The first time I heard from a clinical psychologist that he had prescribed my novel to a narcissistic director as homework, and that it had moved the man where feedback had bounced for years, I understood something about this pattern that now sits at the centre of my practice. That psychologist, incidentally, was Martin Appelo, and the email exchange that followed became a research partnership, a book, and a friendship between two people who recognised the subject in each other. The pattern owed us that much.
Below are three scenes from the novel, translated from the Dutch and lightly condensed, each with the commentary I would offer if we were reading them together. Consider it the cheapest executive coaching available: three scenes, one uncomfortable question per scene, and nobody watching your face while you read.
Scene one: the schoolyard
Dirk’s wife has asked him, at inconvenient notice, to collect the children from school. The chauffeured Audi A8 parks beside the playground; Dirk crosses it with visible reluctance. A mother from the parent council approaches, hand extended: “Corry, I’m on the parents’ committee. I haven’t seen you here before, so I thought I’d introduce myself.” Dirk looks at her steadily and declines the hand. “Good afternoon, madam. I don’t believe I appreciate your attempt at contact. I am collecting my children, and then I am leaving.” Learning that his son is being kept in for detention, he marches into the classroom without knocking, informs the teacher that some people have more important things to do in life, extracts the boy, and lectures her on her inability to grasp interests larger than her rules. By the time the school’s director telephones that evening to address “an incident involving the intimidation of a staff member”, Dirk has already called a member of his own supervisory board who sits on a regional education committee, to arrange for the man to be leaned on. Problem, as Dirk files it, solved.
The commentary. Notice, first, that Dirk is not scheming; he is, by his own sincere account, behaving correctly throughout, and this is the detail readers most reliably miss. In Let’s Talk Leadership I describe the mechanism as the projector: the mind does not record reality, it projects one, and Dirk’s projector casts him as the reasonable man in a world of small people with clipboards. Second, notice the reflex in the final move: status deployed as a weapon, through the back channel, at a primary school. The pattern does not scale its responses to the arena because the arena was never the point; the injury is the point, and every injury is the same size. And third, notice what the scene costs him that he cannot see: the mother, the teacher, the director and a playground full of parents now hold information about Dirk that no engagement survey will ever carry upstairs. The reality distortion field is not built in boardrooms; it is assembled from a thousand schoolyards. The question for the reader: where is your schoolyard, the arena you consider beneath your best behaviour, and who is taking notes there?
Scene two: the sentence
Seven complaints in three months have accumulated, and the supervisory board confronts Dirk: his conduct toward colleagues, the nickname circulating in the firm (“Steve Jobs the Second”, not affectionately), the pattern they can no longer ignore. Their remedy: coaching, with the company’s internal coach. Dirk’s reply, verbatim from the novel and from a hundred real boardrooms: “I have my energy for steering this company. I have no time for the delicate emotions and complex thoughts of other people; that is what HR is for.” When the board persists, in writing, with non-activation as the alternative, Dirk consults his lawyer about dismissing the entire board, discovers he cannot, and chooses the only remaining move: comply, and pretend to find it a good idea. The sessions with the internal coach, Melinda, proceed exactly as that setup predicts. She is competent, warm and methodical; he attends in a state of polite contempt, performs self-reflection (“after some introspection I have come to see it might be good to examine my behaviour”), privately grades her correspondence course, and runs the engagement into the ground. She, to her professional credit, hands the assignment back.
The commentary. This scene is the most quoted in the book by people who buy coaching for a living, because it is a complete taxonomy of how the imposed engagement dies. The board acts correctly on paper: dossier, boundary, consequence, offer of development. What it cannot supply is the one working condition, felt cost on the inside of the armour, and coaching received as sentence is processed as persecution, then as theatre. I have formalised this in Can Narcissistic Executives Be Coached?: the pattern changes when it is privately paying, not when it is publicly billed. Note also the asymmetry of weapons. Melinda brings method; Dirk brings a lifetime of winning rooms. A coach this profile can outgun is worse than no coach, because the failed engagement inoculates: see, I did the coaching, it does not work. Boards who read this scene and wince are remembering money. The question for the reader: if your board sentenced you to development tomorrow, which Dirk would attend, the one who needs it or the one who lawyers it?
Scene three: the experiment
Later in the novel, after the private catastrophe that finally makes the cost feelable, Dirk sits across from a different coach, one he chose, and receives an assignment of insulting simplicity: the next employee to walk through your office door becomes your protégé; you will mentor them, and you will listen. The door opens and it is Gitta, his own secretary, carrying his coffee. What follows is, by the standards of thrillers, nothing: Dirk asks her to sit, inserts one full minute of silence to concentrate, tells her he is pleased with her and wants to hear her ambitions. She, knowing her boss, cycles through the plausible hypotheses: she is being dismissed, she is being restructured, he has developed feelings. He notices her fear, names it, explains the experiment honestly, and then does the single most difficult thing in his repertoire: he listens for an hour. He discovers his secretary has a master’s degree in organisational psychology, a precise diagnosis of the company’s failing IT systems, and more sense than half his executive committee. He acts on her diagnosis the same afternoon, in front of her, giving her the credit by name.
The commentary. First, the fear in the room is the audit. Gitta’s terror at receiving ordinary human interest from her own boss is the most precise measurement of Dirk’s leadership in the entire novel, more exact than the seven complaints; the system had priced his attention as threat. When I conduct stakeholder interviews around a real executive, this is what I am measuring: not what people say about the leader, but what they brace for. Second, the mechanism of the change deserves respect for its smallness. No catharsis, no rebuilt childhood: one designed behaviour, executed badly and then less badly, producing evidence (Gitta is brilliant; listening paid, in currency Dirk actually values) that the projector could not have generated internally. This is the whole logic of behaviour-first change that I later systematised in the seven steps: identity follows behaviour, and one honest experiment outweighs a year of insight. Third, notice what was sitting outside his door the entire time. The unpolished pattern does not merely damage people; it wastes them at industrial scale, and the waste is invisible precisely because discovering it would require the one behaviour the pattern lacks. The question for the reader is Dirk’s assignment itself, which I hereby lend you: who walks through your door next, and what do you actually know about them?
Why the story works when the memo does not
The serious point beneath the literary exercise. Every change methodology stumbles on the same threshold with this profile: information about the self arrives as attack, and the armour does what armour is for. A story slips the checkpoint because it is officially about someone else. The reader supplies the recognition privately, at his own pace, with no witness to perform for and no messenger to punish, and recognition self-administered is the only kind this pattern cannot dismiss. Martin’s narcissistic director changed course not because the novel told him anything his colleagues had not, but because, for once, nobody was telling him; he was reading, alone, and the man on the page was too familiar to acquit and too fictional to sue. Fiction, it turns out, is stakeholder feedback with the fingerprints wiped off. If there is a Dirk in your building, or your mirror, the book is a cheaper first intervention than any I sell, and I say that with a full appreciation of what I sell.
The quotable version: a narcissistic leader will fight a feedback report to the death and then quietly change his life over a novel, because the novel is the one mirror in the building with nobody standing behind it.
Frequently asked questions
Is Wahlberg based on a real CEO? On hundreds of them, which is to say on none. Dirk Wahlberg is a composite of two decades of proximity to leaders under pressure. Every reader who is certain they recognise a specific individual is telling me about their own building, which is rather the point.
Is Wahlberg available in English? The novel was published in Dutch (Wahlberg: Het verhaal van een CEO). The scenes above are my own translations. The frameworks it dramatises are available in English in Let’s Talk Leadership and throughout this article cluster.
Can I really give a book like this to a narcissistic colleague or boss? It has been done many times, occasionally with results; the safest routes are neutral framings (“thought of you, it is about leadership under pressure”) or, better, a lending culture where books circulate without targeting. Handing it over with meaningful eye contact converts the gift into the very feedback the fiction was supposed to bypass.
Does fiction really change executive behaviour? As a door-opener, demonstrably; as a complete intervention, no. The recognition fiction produces still needs the structured follow-through of measured behavioural work to become durable change. Dirk needed the experiment, not just the mirror.
Arvid Buit is a master executive coach (ICF, EMCC, APECS, Marshall Goldsmith SCC), founder of TRUE Leadership, and author of Let’s Talk Leadership, Red de Alfawolf (with Martin Appelo) and Wahlberg: Het verhaal van een CEO. Organisational psychology for professional contexts, not clinical advice. The full field guide · About the coaching practice