Why Do CEOs (Still) Love Ayn Rand?

How did a Russian-born novelist become such an influential “thought leader” for American CEOs, entrepreneurs, and MBAs — and even Alan Greenspan? Consider the message behind Ayn Rand best sellers The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, which speaks to anyone with ambition and a big ego: The gifted should do what’s in their self-interest. If you have a sharp mind, it is your moral responsibility to make yourself happy. The weak are not your problem. “I am for an absolute laissez-faire, free, unregulated economy,” Rand told CBS interviewer Mike Wallace in 1959. “If you separate the government from economics, if you do not regulate production and trade, you will have peaceful cooperation, harmony, and justice among men.”

Rand’s critics claim that the current financial crisis proves her theories unrealistic and selfish. “Her economic ideas were never really relevant or workable,” says Rick Wilson, a sociology instructor at Marshall University in Huntington, W.Va., which offers a class on Rand’s writings. “The time we’re living through is just another example of that.” And yet 51 years after Atlas Shrugged was published, Rand’s writing still wields considerable influence in business.

Rand’s Objectivist philosophy — which calls for facts over feelings, reason over mysticism, individual over state, and selfishness before altruism — wouldn’t have reached the masses if not for her books. Her first best seller, The Fountainhead, weaved those Objectivist beliefs into the speeches of the book’s hero, architect Howard Roark. Roark, who faces trial for dynamiting a building that he designed after his architectural plans were changed behind his back, tells the jury that he lives on his own terms, with no obligation to men except “to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society.”

Drafts of Atlas Shrugged were read by the young Alan Greenspan, who belonged to Rand’s exclusive “Collective,” a group that evangelized Rand’s writings and, in Greenspan’s case, politicized them. Greenspan managed the economic boom of the 1990s on the strength of these ideas, fighting regulatory controls that threatened the free market. But with the Internet bust and corporate scandals that followed, even Greenspan relented as economists scratched their heads over what went wrong. “An infectious greed seemed to grip much of our business community,” Greenspan told The New York Times in 2002. But didn’t Objectivists believe greed is good?

Rand wasn’t the first to argue that government control destroys the entrepreneurial spirit. But it was Rand who went a step further to claim that men are morally obligated to fight for these freedoms.

How She Built a Following

Critics initially slammed Rand’s novels. “Remarkably silly,” “bumptious,” and “preposterous,” the National Review wrote of Atlas Shrugged. But they became best sellers anyway. Readers loved the tart-tongued Rand, with her severe bob and her dollar-sign broaches, not only for her subversive message but for her rebel persona. Business students found Rand through word of mouth, passing around dog-eared copies of Atlas, with its 1,075 pages of plot twists and turns that portray CEOs as heroes instead of villains.

Hugh Hefner and Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas found Rand fascinating. Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and Whole Foods CEO John Mackey both cite Rand’s books as influential, though Mackey has said he doesn’t believe businesses exist solely to make a profit and selfishness is a virtue. In Silicon Valley, Rand’s ideas appeal to generations of entrepreneurs who built the computer industry and the Internet. T.J. Rodgers, CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, is a notorious Rand fan; Patrick W. Grady named his company Rearden Commerce after the steel magnate Hank Rearden from Atlas.

John Allison, the former CEO of banking giant BB&T, has called Atlas “the best defense of capitalism ever written.” Ironically, the bank has taken $3 billion in the recent government bailout. Still, BB&T’s charitable arm donated several million dollars to start classes devoted to Rand’s philosophy on university campuses. At Marshall University’s Lewis College of Business, which received a $1 million BB&T grant, Cal Kent teaches a course that studies Atlas alongside Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Kent says the class uses Rand to compare and contrast economic theories from around the world.

Why She Still Has Fans

In the past year, Rand’s brand of unbridled capitalism has taken a beating. Greenspan, likely Rand’s most famous follower, admitted in October 2008 to a “flaw” in free-market ideology, and Objectivists have since distanced themselves from him. “The bulk of the blame for this crisis should be on the Federal Reserve,” says Yaron Brook, president of the Ayn Rand Institute.

Still, sales of Atlas are stronger than ever. Following media coverage last year of the 50th anniversary of the book’s publication, sales rocketed to 185,000 copies, an all-time high.

Many executives are taking refuge in Rand’s heroes today — just as some did in the wake of the Enron scandal, when suddenly all CEOs were painted as villains by an angry public. Her books offer reassurance that self-interest makes the most sense both economically and morally. Entrepreneur Joshua Zader named his two companies after Rand’s work: Atlas Web Development and Atlasphere, an online meeting and dating site for Objectivists, which is currently connecting nearly 10,000 admirers of her philosophy. Anne Omrod, CEO of Chicago-based John Galt Solutions, read Atlas in 1997 and named her company for the novel’s hero. Omrod says C-level execs, now more than ever, approach her at conferences to chat about the company name and Rand. She estimates that a third of her staff of software implementers have read the book and swears she can tell when they have: They perform better. “We don’t make it a requirement to read it,” she says. “You can definitely tell the folks who are reading it. They change their mentality to do good work.”

Another reason Rand is as popular as ever: She was right, argue her followers. They say that much of what she railed against — incompetent CEOs, federal bailouts, bloated government— has become our economic reality today. But was Rand right about the solution? If so, it would take nothing short of a John Galt-inspired strike of the entrepreneurs and the dog-eat-dog capitalists to save this economy.

Music is God

Music
Is the essence of life
Music
Elevates a Human being to a supreme being
Music
Makes one forget grief and smile in glee.
Music
Breaks barriers and differences and unites against evil forces

I believe its true, because I have seen, felt and experienced the kind of effect Music can have on a lifeless soul.

Yes that’s what I was, a lifeless soul, struggling and wriggling with my life, confused, and having a difficult time trying to figure out what I wanted to do with it. My father got tired of telling me to take my life seriously, I always brushed it aside, and so I did even when so many others told me the same, I felt I was happy, and that was what, was important, but soon I realized that, that which I thought was an interesting way of leading life, was actually ruining me, and I realized this at a time when all my plans suddenly shattered right in front of my eyes, and in times such as these what I missed was expressing my feelings to someone, somehow, it was difficult for me to put how I felt in words, and if I did, people always had one common thing to say ‘I told you so’, the only thing that was there to console me was a tape recorder which at least gave me some company, and that’s when I realized what I lacked, The knowledge of Music, I felt, that was a wonderful way of expressing feelings and emotions without saying a word.

Love for music was something that came to me by birth, what with mom being a classical singer and veena player, dad’s astounding sense of rhythm, and my brothers mastery on the Tabla, I was expected to be some kind of a child prodigy, and so dad made me join a music class to learn carnatic classical on the violin, I myself enjoyed it, the sound of the violin was just magical, but my arrogance took over me, and I neglected it to the extent that, eventually I quit learning the violin.

I didn’t feel the absence of music in my life for a long time after that, there were other things that my mind was preoccupied with, but I felt inferior, angry and jealous whenever I saw a friend of mine playing a beautiful tune on some instrument or other, flawlessly, I used to wonder how they could manage to play something having heard it only once or twice before, It kind of became an unsolved mystery for me, and I had to unravel it somehow or the other.

As always, the opportunity couldn’t wait for me to take the initiative and presented itself for me, I just had to notice it, which I did, and then grab it with both my hands, and I would have been an idiot had I not done that. The Brass Band was the best thing that could have ever happened to me, I would have regretted if I wouldn’t have joined it, I had not even seen a real saxophone, but for the movies, so when I first got the chance to lay my hands on a tenor saxophone, I was on seventh heaven.

And then, started the musical part of my life, the most beautiful and exhilarating part of my life. It being a b-flat instrument, I got an opportunity to play the lead tunes along with the trumpets, unlike the alto’s which played a supporting role, with each and every piece my love for music just multiplied exponentially, and soon the inquisitive side of me started nudging me to try and experiment, practice sessions were something that I really looked forward to, for the first time in my life, there was something which was as close to me and dear to me as my own life. I was literally in love with it. For two beautiful years of my life I was proud to be a part of a musically talented and highly professional group, “The Sathya Sai Brass Band”.

Every good thing that starts has to end one day, I finished college and was all set to join the corporate world, but unfortunately, I had to let go off the band and the instrument which was highly responsible in introducing me to myself. Though I was very excited about what life had in store for me on the other side, there was something pricking and jabbing at me reminding me of all that I was going to miss.

Life after college became routine and mechanical, and this time I didn’t take too long to realize what was missing, and so when I got an opportunity to join the Alumni Band, I just didn’t waste any time, the New Year program was phenomenal, and was the kind of thing would just pump your spirits high. That year it was decided, that we will be taking up programs in the middle of the years also, and soon after the new year preparations started for these midyear programs, the venues were identified, pieces were selected and practice sessions organized, man it was all happening, I couldn’t make it to the first program at Karunashraya, but the second program at a orphanage in Chennai was a great hit, more than anything else, everybody was so excited that, it was as if we were back to our childhood, and the children were just unstoppable, every song, every piece was cheered, it was such a hit that they just wouldn’t let us go. This surely was life.

This new year, again I had to miss, but then when it was decided that we should be giving one more program at Karunashraya, I didn’t want to miss it, the practice sessions started in full swing, as each of us had offices to attend, we would meet up at 10:00 in the night and wake up the neighbors. The long drives, sleepless nights and a hard days work all this didn’t bother us at all, there were guys who were even going to office at midnight after the practice, there were others who left their visiting relatives back home and attended practice, all this because we wanted to play good music, the ultimate objective, we wanted to bring a smile on those faces, just for a moment we wanted them to forget their pain and enjoy, experience and live life. The night prior to the program, it was decided that we would all meet up near the mortuary of the hospital and wake up the dead, as they we thought were a much better audience as compared to the sleeping and snoring neighbours and so we did, what with our ‘Brass explosions’, ‘Ganga jatadhara’ and the ‘Socha Hai’s’, even the dead would surely have enjoyed the splendor of music. On the day of the program, though we were performing there for the second time, for me it was a first hand experience of the one thing that is common among the human race irrespective of their color, race, nationality or religion – Pain and Suffering. With each and every note that we played, with each and every song that we sang, we could see their lips opening up to a wide smile, One inmate even went to the extent of saying that our music made him forget his pain for a short span of time, and that really moved all of us to tears. And that was enough for me to realize that “Music is God”.