by Arvid Buit | Jul 30, 2026 | Leadership Blog
How do you work for a narcissistic boss as a senior executive? Avoid the two instinctive strategies, public confrontation and silent endurance, because the first triggers retaliation and the second licenses escalation. What works is calm, boundaried usefulness:...
by Arvid Buit | Jul 30, 2026 | Leadership Blog
What should a board do about a narcissistic CEO? Diagnose the phase before the person, gather stakeholder reality independently of the CEO’s narration, act while results are still good, and choose deliberately between three options: govern the pattern, develop it...
by Arvid Buit | Jul 30, 2026 | Leadership Blog
What is a polished alpha wolf? A polished alpha wolf is a leader who keeps the full narcissistic engine (decisiveness, threat sensitivity, courage, vision) but has deliberately added the one capacity the pattern lacks: reciprocity. The unpolished alpha wolf runs the...
by Arvid Buit | Jul 30, 2026 | Leadership Blog
Talented narcissism is the productive end of the narcissistic spectrum: the combination of drive, charisma, vision and crisis composure that grows out of an early deficit in unconditional recognition, and that gives its owner a genuine head start in leadership while...
by Arvid Buit | Jul 30, 2026 | Leadership Blog
Narcissism and Leadership: The Executive’s Field Guide By Arvid Buit. Based on two decades of C-suite coaching practice and the research conducted with clinical psychologist Martin Appelo for Red de Alfawolf (Boom, ISBN 9789024422753) and the business novel Wahlberg...
by Arvid Buit | Jul 26, 2026 | Blog, Leadership Blog
Succession almost never fails in the plan. It fails in the founder who wrote it. I have sat in enough of these rooms to know the shape of the thing before anyone speaks. The document is excellent. There is a timeline, a governance structure, a shareholders’...
