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THE BRAND CALLED THEM: According to a recent cover story in The Economist, “The world is falling out of love with celebrity CEOs.”

As if there was anything particularly lovable about such grandstanders in the first place.

The article, if accurate, reflects the inevitable burnout of a phenomenon that exploded during the dot-com mania of the late ’90s. There had, of course, been famous industrialists and financiers since the dawn of corporate America. But the PC/Internet/tech services/website industries honed and refined the phenom beyond the mere Celebrity CEO, into something approaching religious status.

The Cult of the CEO quickly developed its own rules and practices. Among them:

• The Cult CEO must be a white male.
• The Cult CEO should preferably be 6′ 2″ or taller. Bill Gates, the ultimate Cult CEO, gets away with being an exception to this rule, just as he gets away with nearly everything.
• The Cult CEO is always referenced by first-name-only within the company. New employees are told, usually as the first item on the first day of training, to always call the CEO simply “Bob” or “Glen” or whatever. This can perhaps be traced to the old “est” motivational training organization, whose adherents always called their leader “Werner.”
• The Cult CEO demands total loyalty, both to the company and to himself as its avatar.
• The Cult CEO demands total dedication. The most effective of these can successfully make their employees/worshippers want to work 168 hours a week (three quarters of that in the form of unpaid overtime, the rest for deferred stock options); and then to spend the rest of their time writing “grassroots” emails to elected officials demanding the Cult CEO’s lifetime exemption from income taxes.
• The Cult CEO is the entire reason for the company’s existence, or is depicted as such in all corporate PR. Every product launch, every patent, every profitable quarter, every rise in the stock price is due solely to the CEO’s omniscient decisiveness. (Every unprofitable quarter or decline in the stock price is blamed on the federal government not letting the CEO have everything his way.)
• The Cult CEO is the sole purpose for all company activities. Potentially successful products are scuttled if they rely on “Not Invented Here” technologies that wouldn’t enhance the CEO’s trailblazer image. Vital employees are sacked at wholesale levels, just so the CEO can appear to be taking decisive actions. And of course, profits (or directions that might lead to profitability) are routinely eschewed in favor of tactics designed solely to boost the CEO’s personal stock-worth.
• The Cult CEO demands ritual sacrifices. No employee/worshipper can claim true devotion to the CEO except by renouncing any semblance of family, personal life, or present/future sanity; by enthusiastically working one’s way into (a) a premature heart attack, (b) emotional burnout verging on catatonia, (c) the attainment of a spiritual epiphany akin to that achieved by fasting and self-flogging for six months straight, or (d) all of the above.

Now, as you all know, dozens of Cult CEOs have been deposed and desanctified by the whims of the marketplace. Thousands of hyper-loyal followers have been shoved out of the organizations that had been their entire lives’ focuses. These men and women need our empathy; but more importantly they need our help.

This is why MISCmedia.com is proud to announce the first of what will, with all luck and fortitude, become a nationwide circuit of CEO-cult deprogramming centers.

The lonely, the forlorn, the purposeless humans left behind by defunct CEO cults (as well as those who were expunged or escaped from still-extant CEO cults) will enter (either on their own volition or upon interventions by loved ones) for resident stays of one to six weeks, depending on the severity of their conditions. They will learn to respond to their own names, to use common kitchen utensils, to wash and clothe themselves, to write complete sentences without the use of emoticons, and eventually to form and express personal opinions without first asking for permission.

This type of treatment is expensive. But think of it as an investment in our society’s future.

Send your donations now to OPERATION IRL (for “In Real Life”), in care of your local 12-step organization or sex-toy shop. And don’t give ’til it hurts; give ’til it feels good.