The Founder’s Curse: A Formal Impossibility Theorem on Charismatic Leadership

Charismatic leadership often produces spectacular initial success followed by organizational collapse. This paper develops a formal impossibility trilemma showing that charismatic organizations cannot simultaneously achieve (1) high performance under the founder, (2) long-run sustainability after the founder’s departure, and (3) endogenous maintenance of internal diversity. This result generalizes and extends Antoci, Bruni, Russu and Smerilli (2020), demonstrating that their “founder’s curse” is not a contingent behavioral pathology but a structural property of co-evolutionary systems with complementary production. When conformist implementers and non-conformist innovators are both essential for output, the geometry of the system’s basins of attraction implies that initial success systematically destroys post-founder viability. The very brilliance of the founder creates the conditions for future collapse. This “founder’s curse” is thus a genuine impossibility theorem in the Arrowian sense: at most two of the three desirable goals—performance, sustainability, and diversity—can be jointly realized. The paper clarifies the theoretical logic behind this constraint, compares it with the substitutable-skills model of Antoci et al. (2020), and discusses the practical implications for the design of innovative organizations. The impossibility result redefines the problem of leadership succession: not how to avoid the curse, but which trade-off to accept.