Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Frost

Executives love to mythologize their own downfall. It flatters the class: the hard-driving boss brought low by booze, a tragic hero with a “human” weakness. Frost punctures that convenient story with a poet’s clean misdirection. He names the expected villain - alcoholism - then swaps in the quieter, more respectable contagion: egotism. The move isn’t moralistic so much as diagnostic. Addiction is visible, socially legible, even treatable. Egotism hides in plain sight, rewarded as “confidence,” “vision,” “leadership.” In corporate life, it can pass for competence right up to the moment it wrecks the room.

Calling it a “disease” is the real knife. Frost isn’t describing a peccadillo; he’s describing something that spreads. Egotism infects decision-making: it narrows the field of information, turns dissent into disloyalty, converts organizations into echo chambers calibrated to one person’s self-image. An executive’s ego doesn’t just distort their own judgment; it reorganizes everyone else’s incentives. People learn what to say, what not to report, which risks to hide. The culture becomes a prophylactic against the boss’s embarrassment rather than a system for telling the truth.

Frost’s context matters: a poet watching modern institutions swell in size and authority, where “management” becomes a profession and charisma can masquerade as wisdom. His line warns that the most dangerous impairment at the top is the one that looks like strength - and gets applauded until it becomes pathological.