BURSTING THE CEO BUBBLE: Illuminating the Unseen Disconnect
Walter W. Bettinger II, the ex. Co-Chairman and CEO of The Charles Schwab Corporation, famously defined his “CEO Bubble” as taking two insidious forms:
“People telling you what they think you want to hear,” and
“People being fearful to tell you things they believe you don’t want to hear.”
I would add a third, equally dangerous form:
3. “CEOs being dishonest with themselves by self-denying a different truth to the one they want to believe.”
This “CEO Bubble” is a powerful manifestation of the Streetlight Effect. In this fundamental challenge, leadership’s perspective is inadvertently constrained by filtered information, fear, or self-deception. It’s an emotion-driven circumstance, and while emotions are unique and unpredictable, their consequences are very real. The scale of this problem is starkly highlighted by research (like Sidney Yoshida’s often-cited “Iceberg of Ignorance”), which suggests that only a tiny fraction of a company’s problems are known to senior management. This vast lack of insight is a profound risk, an Opaque Black Box of unknown unknowns that directly dictates the size and danger of the CEO Bubble.
The conundrum then becomes: How do you genuinely tackle this? As innovation expert Clayton Christensen observed, “Every answer has a question that retrieves it.” And as Elon Musk notes, “A lot of times, the question is harder than the answer.” The key, then, is not to force an answer but to retrieve the right question by understanding the problem from a fundamentally different point of view.
The answer lies in understanding the core truth:
“THE SIZE OF THE CEO BUBBLE IS DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL TO THE emotional DISCONNECT DISTANCE BETWEEN AN ORGANISATION AND ITS CUSTOMERS. THESE SMALL, UNSEEN, UNCHECKED FACTORS SHAPE THAT BRAND.”
— Morten J. Sørensen
The further this organisational customer disconnect, the greater the instances of filtered information and self-denial. Over time, the CEO Bubble becomes untenable, leading to significant value erosion.
This fundamental insight became the core of how to solve the CEO Bubble challenge: by finding how to verifiably show and quantify the emotional disconnect between an organisation and its customers. This value is not immeasurable; it is profoundly quantifiable.
The SØRENSEN Framework is precisely designed to burst this CEO Bubble. Through its Organisational CT Scan, it assesses over 2.459.600 interconnected hidden human factors between an organisation and its customers. It delves deep into finding customers’ emotion-driven view of that organisation, pinpointing and quantifying its true unknown-unknowns. The core design of our diagnostic approach is to give owners and leaders an unbiased, verifiable view of their organisation’s performance, including its true strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Ultimately, The SØRENSEN Framework provides an unparalleled window into your, or even your competitors’ CEO Bubble—allowing you to see the critical truths that others do not and transforming hidden risks into clear paths for sustainable growth.
