One huge problem facing community banks is that they’re all the same. They offer checking accounts and CDs. They offer savings accounts. They make mortgages, and business loans. But the big national banks do all of that, too, and more. They add spiffy new technology, and lots more ATMs, and their advertising budgets are bigger than the entire asset size of many local lenders.

What community banks need is innovation. They need visionary leaders to find new approaches, new financial products and services. They need CEOs who can get past the risk-averse traditional ways of doing business.

They need overconfident jerks.

Community banks are becoming commodities, largely indistinguishable from one another, and thrown to the wind when any competitor offers 25 basis points more in interest. Someone has to figure out how to transform their institution into something bold, something daring, something fascinating. What’s needed is a Steve Jobs, upending gargantuan Microsoft with a left-turn approach at Apple.

For that to happen, bank boards need to look at their executive leadership. And they need to ask themselves: Is our CEO stable, solid and a good risk manager? Because if he is, we should fire him.

Lynn Stout, a law professor at Cornell University, makes this point in her new book, “The Shareholder Value Myth: How Putting Shareholders First Harms Investors, Corporations and the Public.” When managers focus myopically on short-term earnings, she says, they end up shortchanging investment and innovation and ultimately harm employees, customers and communities.

What’s needed then, is a CEO willing to push past the board, and past conventional wisdom, to be innovative and create more value. What’s needed is someone with an ego bigger than Frankenstorm.

While an overconfident CEO is often portrayed as a liability, making harmful business decisions based on arrogance – and ultimately running a company into the ground –a  study in the latest Journal of Finance suggests that overconfident CEOs in fact help companies achieve greater levels of innovation by pursuing riskier projects with potentially greater rewards, and typically fostering larger investments.

That’s the conclusion of David Hirshleifer at the University of California, Irvine’s Paul Merage School of Business. He and his colleagues studied the effects of overconfident CEOs – leaders who often manage companies through the sheer force of ego and arrogance – in the decade between 1993 and 2003. He found that overconfident CEOs are more likely to achieve innovative success, specifically pointing to leaders like Jobs.

It’s probable that the folks at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. might have a different view on the matter of risk-taking than do the eggheads at UCal. Regulators of any stripe tend to wag fingers at management that seems oblivious to oncoming risk. But banking is not a business of risk avoidance; it’s one of risk mitigation. Every loan is a risk, every check cashed a prayer against fraud.

Since it’s unseemly – and perhaps litigation-inducing – to prod a bank CEO toward riskier behavior, the way around it is to simply hire one who’s already inclined to push the envelope.

What’s particularly interesting in the UCal study is that it took special notice of chief executives who were so confident that they acted against their own best interests. Many leaders are compensated with stock options, and cash those options in as soon as they vest. But the overconfident CEOs frequently waited. Their risk-taking could have hurt their companies – and their companies’ stock price, which would have put their own options under water. But they believed they had put their organizations on the right path, and were willing to put their own money on the line.

“Overconfident CEOs are more ready to take on risky projects that are very promising, but could also easily fail,” said Hirshleifer, whose expertise includes corporate finance, investments, and behavioral finance. “Less confident CEOs may shy away from such projects, missing out on such growth opportunities.”

Vincent Michael Valvo is CEO of Agility Resources Group LLC. He can be reached at vvalvo@agilityresourcesgroup.com.