When I was an employee of National Instruments for a brief period, I worked in the Bengaluru R&D centre. We’d have a few “key leadership meetings” once every often, and board-level members would thus visit the office multiple times a year for some business decisions.

What caught my (and arguably most of the office’s) fancy was one particular guy’s height - he was probably 7 feet (okay, 210 cm) tall - and you’d have to really put in some effort to see his forehead, settling for the chin for the most part. Though not the CEO, he was at a really high (or tall?) position (maybe just one echelon beneath the CEO’s), and that got me thinking - could there be a relation between someone’s height and their leadership position in a corporation?

Well, it’s a fair question to ask, and I was pleased to find that people think about this. There’s more here and these results are from a quick Google search. I’m sure one can dig deeper and see for themselves what being tall may or may not mean for leadership roles!

There are outliers, of course - Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, for instance. They’re much shorter than the average CEO (at the time of writing, even shorter than me, in fact!) but these are rather contrived examples of tech geeks-turned-CEOs. Perhaps in more traditional, ultra-hierarchical corporations the case might be different and being tall might really mean something.

Apparently there’s something called height discrimination that also seems to be an issue; I guess biological differences just have to be accepted at some point.

We can nevertheless make do with what we have. Or so I console myself, being in the Netherlands, arguably the strangely ironically tallest-but-lowest country on the planet. (?)