This chapter critiques the tendency to regard hubris within business organisations purely as a matter of excessive self-confidence. ‘Hubris’ is often used as a catch-all explanation for all business failure. The chapter therefore looks at other ingredients of hubris within business, including the concentration of excessive power in the hands of a few people at the top. These organisational factors are at least as important as psychological markers for hubris. The chapter identifies some widely held negative consequences of hubris, such as the unwise pursuit of mergers and acquisitions. It also explores some of the ways in which hubristic behaviours benefit individuals, including those who aspire to become CEOs. Examples are provided from the banking and finance sectors. These show a variety of destructive behaviours, including recklessness, contempt for critical feedback and abusive behaviour towards others. Finally, measures are suggested to limit the prevalence of hubris within business.

Galen system is based on three pillars: the affected body part, the type of qualities imbalanced, and the degree of imbalance. Therefore, he only distinguishes between mental illness and impaired consciousness when there is a difference between these two entities in any of these three pillars. Thus, he distinguishes phrenitis from melancholia but not from mania. The emphasis on the system, on the other hand, enables him a very tight notion of disease, where symptoms, mechanisms, affected organ and treatment are closely linked.

Hubris (in so many ways) is still with us: commentators and pundits still return repeatedly to this ancient Greek concept as a way of diagnosing the shortcomings of leadership and foresight that underpin contemporary political and business failures. These appeals to the notion of hubris rest on aspects of the ancient phenomenon that would have been familiar to an ancient theorist such as Aristotle. But beyond these popular understandings, hubris has become a term of art in contemporary academic approaches to leadership and management and is widely considered to have congeners and analogues in contemporary psychology. Yet these disciplines are rarely brought into dialogue with the intellectual history of classical Greece. This Introduction remedies that deficiency by outlining the approaches of contemporary classics, business and management studies and psychology and discussing the potential for each of these disciplines to draw and learn from the insights of the others.

Like their forerunners, post-Hellenistic doctors also grappled with the unclear boundaries between healthy versus pathologic sleep, and consciousness-unconsciousness. Furthermore, they incorporated new diseases and redefined others - like lethargy - that were specifically associated with this process. Celsus considered sleep as all-or-nothing phenomenon, without recognising different depths. Regarding mental capacities, he subsumed most of them in his idea of mens/animus. Aretaeus, on the other hand did conceive different depths of sleep, and his eclectic method enabled him to find alternative pathophysiological explanations to characterise several of its main features. Similarly, although his organization of mental capacities varied according to what he was explaining, the opposition gnômê-aisthêsis was important in his idea of mind.

Management scholars and psychologists have puzzled about how best to define, identify and measure hubris and hubristic tendencies, with only partial success. Such attempts try to help us see what lies behind the analogy between the ancient vice of hybris and its modern re-conceptualisation. In this chapter we explore how the processes of making metaphors work and how storytelling affects the teller and the audience. We examine what purposes storytelling serves, especially when its achieves a mythic character. We explore where aesthetics and literary theorising intersect with evolutionary psychology, and by connecting that to management studies. This leads to observations about the nature and practice of leadership that might signal hubris in the making. That might just help us see when the dark side of modern hubris snuffs out its bright-side potential, and perhaps how to prevent it doing so. This may help leaders learn when not to believe their own storytelling (or press releases).

4 Post-Hellenistic authors present a more compartmentalised idea of diseases in general and of impaired consciousness in particular. Unlike the Hippocratics, who barely discussed mental illness, these authors did distinguish impaired consciousness from mental illness through a classificatory system of dichotomic oppositions, additionally they discussed new conditions which are not mentioned in the HC. In most theorisations, perceptions play an increasingly relevant role to understand these conditions.

In the Introduction I set out to explore accounts of impaired consciousness in ancient medical texts through two axes. In the longitudinal thematic one, I aimed to contrast the different approaches to the topic against their respective medical contexts, and to establish relationships between texts, authors and periods. The transversal axis, on the other hand, focused on how the development of ideas and debates around impaired consciousness illuminates our understanding of other concepts about ancient medicine in general, and about the alluded to authors in particular. In summarising the main findings of this research I will first focus on the transversal axis, and then I shall add my final remarks about impaired consciousness itself.

Hippocratic doctors discussed two forms of total loss of consciousness. The most common one, where they equated fainting with a separation of the soul, and another form - independent from the psuchê - where they saw the concurrence of numerous independent bodily symptoms that ended up in a swoon. The momentary disruption of cognitive functions that occurred during fainting, and their definite cessation with death made them conceive the soul as both a broad notion that subsumed numerous mental capacities (which transiently separated from the body during swoons) and as a life force that abandoned the body for good with death.

The prototypical form of hybris in the Greek sources involved the self-assertion of the rich and powerful, which resulted in their disrespecting their subordinates in arrogating to themselves claims to respect they were not entitled to. This contribution looks at the flipside of this scenario, because hybris can also work in the opposite direction: from the bottom up. Hybris, that is, can also involve subordinates overstepping their position in the social hierarchy and arrogating to themselves prerogatives reserved for those higher up the social ladder. While denouncing the hybris of the powerful has egalitarian implications – it defends the right to equal respect (or at least to some respect) of those who are disrespected – denouncing the hybris of the downtrodden towards their superiors is a tool for maintaining and reproducing a social hierarchy by grounding it on an allegedly shared (yet heavily asymmetrical) recognition order.

As a cognitive bias, hubris leads entrepreneurs to overestimate both the likelihood of success and the contribution of firms’ resources to their success. Accordingly, in this chapter, we investigate how entrepreneurs’ hubris influences strategy formulation, performance attribution and responses to performance outcomes. We posit that heightened levels of  hubris in entrepreneurs diminish the significance of external performance in shaping strategy while amplifying the importance of relative performance. When evaluating performance, hubris plays a pivotal role: elevated levels of hubris lead entrepreneurs to attribute positive outcomes to themselves while shifting blame for negative outcomes onto external factors and others. In addition, we recognise that heightened hubris intensifies the commitment to chosen strategies, potentially escalating their pursuit despite adverse circumstances. In disentangling the effect of hubris bias in defining and interpreting firm performance, this chapter assists entrepreneurs in making more conscious and informed decisions.