I always think it's good that people research things that are considered "obvious" because there is always that rare chance you will discover something unexpected! That said, nothing interesting was really discovered here - the article does go into a bit more detail but you can really summarize it as "people don't like to work with assholes, and people especially don't like to work for assholes"
Hmmm...my experience is very different. A lot of seemingly normal people are just fine, if not happy to be led by psychopaths and narcissists. They view their "confidence" as a plus because they don't dig deeply or are just scared, wimps and like a big strong "asshole" to lead them. I honestly blame the rise of asshole CEO's and leaders on the normies, who don't want to be be held accountable.
People follow the path of least resistance - it's easier for most people to play the office politics game where the boss will let them than do the work before them. It's still a failure of management and leadership however.
Confidence and assertiveness are important leadership traits. I don't know what's considered "seemingly normal", but different people can make radically different judgments of character, and a lot of narcissists can exploit this. People who can and do reliably detect psychopaths and narcissists tend to develop an aversion.
This is the truth about leadership. As long as everyone is getting their due, few will care about the overt sociopathy of the leader and those that do will have no political power to change it. That's one truth I had to discover via experience and it destroyed my morale and idealism.
I agree here 200%. People may not want to be “the asshole”,
but they want to work under “the asshole” because they think it will benefit them and help them get what they want because their leaders are willing to be cutthroat, which may benefit them.
If it were all that obvious, we wouldn't have so many abusive narcissists in positions of power. I'll leave politics aside, but just taking companies in the news this week, we can look at Adam Neumann and Travis Kalanick as narcissists who couldn't even get a company to IPO due to failures of collaboration and integrity.
The article correctly points out some of the direct economic damage. It ignores the significant damage to people done by abusive narcissists; from personal experience I can say it's substantial. You can see that in the interviews with WeWork employees.
But another kind of damage is what they prevent from existing. Kalanick was aggressive in killing competition; Lyft was the only one he couldn't spend into the grave. Neumann has deeply distorted the market for coworking. Or we could look at Zuckerberg [1]; what kind of open social networks could we have ended up with if he hadn't ruthlessly pursued a personally-dominated monopoly?
> But another kind of damage is what they prevent from existing.
At least for VC-backed direct competition, nothing of value is lost. The business is commodity - driving people around in cars, delivering food, renting office space, offering rides on e-scooters, running under-the-table hotels, whatever. All that the insane amounts of VC enable is network effects and marketplace dominance - people don't call a pizza shop or a cab company any more, they open the Delivery Hero or Uber apps. But someone still has to make the pizza or drive the cab, which means until fully automated driving is reality, there is no direct loss in jobs.
The more interesting things are rather the "competition" that is entrenched companies... most obvious in taxis. Usually, taxis are regulated (meaning, their cars have appropriate insurance, silent alarm devices in case the driver gets robbed, and most importantly mandatory service areas and times). Uber/Lyft etc. can now pick the profitable cherries (airport transfers, drunk partygoers on Friday/Saturday) and leave the unprofitable times or areas to the regular cabs - who cannot run at an overall profit anymore as the business/hipster clientele is now using Uber/Lyft. Who suffers? Entire communities now underserved by taxis, old people (who don't have smartphones)... but no one really looks at which negative impact his/her company will have on minorities.
Yeah, apparently it is not that obvious as on HN these 3 you named were worshipped here, negative/critical comments downvoted, while objectively the writing was on the wall. Wework being the most obvious to me personally; that was a shitshow from the start and yet people here actually believed that would succeed.
My favourite is when someone points out had bad these companies are, inevitably someone else links "the Dropbox thread" as justification. This is tremendously ironic, because Dropbox hasn't made a dime yet either.
Totally agreed. And I'd be much more comfortable if people here could split the two. E.g., "I'm not sure if that business will work, but I hope so because I just love Neumann; he's so magnetic, so compelling!"
But instead we get supposedly hyper-rational arguments that are pretty clearly highly emotional. And then when the wheels come off, the support just evaporates, with nary a "mea culpa", let alone a "here's how WeWork fooled me" post.
Narcissists are a specific kind of asshole. They tend to seek power and they are very good at convincing the people above them that they deserve it. That's what makes them more dangerous to an organization than average assholes.
I've always thought that was more of a meme/rumor than actual fact. It seems unlikely to me that the average executive is somebody with a fragile ego that lacks empathy. From my perspective it can't be the case. The executives I've worked with have always been powerful teammates with great listening/communication skills. Maybe I'm just lucky?
Narcissists conduct abuse within intimate (romantic, familial or very close friends) relationships. Outside of those relationships, they're typically very well-behaved and even adored.
I'm an emotional philosopher, not a psychologist. But here's my take:
There are two fundamental arguments of the self: additive and subtractive.
The additive argument is called love. It tells us to add to the self.
The subtractive argument is called disgust. It tells us to remove from the self.
Codependents are addicted to the chemical rewards of love, while narcissists are addicted to the chemical rewards of disgust.
Narcissists therefore have an overwhelming need to eject things as "not good enough" from their extended self. If I tell a stranger his haircut looks stupid, I don't get a disgust reward. If I tell my son that, I do get the reward because he is part of my extended self.
Basically, narcissists have extremely high standards for themselves. They want to become fast friends because they want (need, really) to share that terrible burden.
Narcissists don't have a real self, they have a developed mask that sits on top of it. Usually developed in childhood for a parent.
You can't police feelings into evidence of pathology. Some people are more disgust sensitive than others. There is light and dark to everything, including love and disgust.
>You're right that love and disgust can both be good or bad, but nobody said otherwise
You did when you made disgust a fundamental negative and love a fundamental positive. But whatever.
>If you're addicted to a feeling then that is a pathology.
Not necessarily, some people deliberately go through bad feelings for the sake of getting to the bottom of something and integrating that answer. That can seem like an addiction from the outside.
Nobody knows where feelings come from, what makes them real and but not a mask, a behaviour people can embody? They are both real.
You said:
"There are two fundamental arguments of the self"
You conflated criticizing haircuts with a disgust reward and constructed a view on narcissists that is defined by feelings nearly everyone feels. Your view on feelings is too limited to identify a narcissist, as demonstrated by the idea that you can go through feelings and appear to be an addict from outside, but not be one.
Butted in to what? A public thread?
The mask idea comes from psychology. A narcissist suffers narcissitic wounds at an early age and learns to develop a false persona to please abusive parents instead of a healthy self that grows over time. They stay locked in a cycle of abuse trying to escape past trauma instead of dealing with it and it is unleashed on those around them when the tension becomes too much. They frequently rely on charm and a single talent to get them achievements to please said relationship and are found to be brittle or liars when challenged. They will suck the life-force out of others to fuel their own lack of a self. There is a whole bunch of psychological information on this.
This all has an overlap with the external version of the story, the narcissus myth. Narcissus is a spirit that embodies the story of self love, being so captivating to some. He has multiple outcomes. In one he captures the attention of another so completely that their life becomes drained away and the adorer becomes no more than an echo in a forest, which mirrors the fueling the self & abuse cycle from psychology. In another part he sees his reflection in a pool and becomes unable to leave his own reflection and eventually suicides or recognizes that the love cannot be reciprocated and becomes a flower, which mirrors a lot of the empathy focused therapy techniques.
Read Malignant Self Love by Sam Vaknin and come to your own conclusions. The discussion in this post is fairly shallow. Pushing the requirement to judge character into a few key signs is not really going to work.
If you're considering them teammates then maybe you're not seeing them for who they are. The negative behavior only comes out when they have direct power over you, and doesnt really get bad until they know you won't retaliate.
I still remember one of my first managers that seemed like a nice person who went absolutely psychopathic during 1-on-1 when nobody else was in the office that day, attempting to completely destroy me, perked with wonderful statements like "your performance doesn't matter for your career progression", "you can't do anything about it", "I can do whatever I want to you", "it's for the company (i.e. him = company)". All after I solved their main problems within my first few months and laid groundwork for their next successful product. Later I learned there was some internal clique of people pushing each other forward and I was considered a threat - at that time I was pretty naïve, one could tell idealistic after achieving academic excellence at top schools, believing in "innate goodness" of people (LOL).
Now that person is a senior director at Google. Good luck to anyone affected! I am still thinking I should have destroyed him back then and stop the tumor right in the beginning...
A more interesting question is how do you separate narcissism from idealism in a startup founder? I mean it takes a certain type of person to defy the world against all odds. Sometimes you end up with someone like Elizabeth Holmes, and sometimes you end up with someone like Yvon Chouinard.
I've always considered this the worst possible test. Anyone remotely concerned with their image wouldn't openly treat a waitress poorly in front of company, because they know that company is observing them. If anything, this is the kind of test I'd think a narcissist would propose in order to make themselves look better.
Intellectual/social/cultural/artsy etc. curiosity is a very nice test that's not too easy to "fake". Narcissists just don't seem to care that much about the outside world; maybe that also requires a kind of empathy they do not have.
For example, consider Steve Jobs. I think you could reasonably describe him as being self-centered, egotistical, and mean. In some ways he superficially resembles many descriptions of narcissism; he even had a similar type of charisma that many successful narcissists share. Except by all accounts, he actually did care passionately about lots of things in the outside world, he cared about music and art and design and beauty. I think fundamentally, rather than being a narcissist, he cared entirely too much about certain things to an unhealthy degree. I don't think it's helpful to lose your temper, but whereas a narcissist will lose his temper when it comes to his own ego, Steve Jobs lost his temper when it came to the world around him not living up to the high standards he was trying to hold everything to. And, not coincidentally, Steve Jobs was a successful startup founder regardless of his personality flaws.
Nah. You want an example of a textbook Narcissist? Well, we're all very familiar with one these days. Very different from Steve Jobs, though. Jobs' overt "narcissism" was an act, something he conciously cultivated as part of playing the "game" of creating a successful business. You can see this in many ways if you look carefully.
> Jobs' overt "narcissism" was an act, something he conciously cultivated as part of playing the "game" of creating a successful business. You can see this in many ways if you look carefully.
Can you please point out some of the many ways he was supposedly manipulating people to run a business better, and how they aren't a byproduct of narcissism?
I’ve worked in places where executives had to be narcissistic or sociopaths just to survive. People with intact emotions have difficulty coping with the toxicity.
Nonetheless chose to in the first place, insofar as nobody's forcing anyone to climb the exec ladder, and there are lots of places to do it — in fact, it requires several in a career usually, to reach the highest ranks, unless it's a familial-type affair.
“God laughs at those who deplore the effects of which causes they cherish.” (Bossuet)
I have this general KPI for myself: if it makes me become a worse human being, then it's bad for me, thus I should either run away the other direction, or buckle up and change things. It can't be ignored or 'endured' for it's the 'bad' kind of pain, the kind that doesn't make you grow but just eats at you. The kind that commands you to fight or flee but certainly not freeze.
And you're right, most places aren't like that. I never forget that >90% of businesses in most rich countries employ less than 10 people. Also know that in an average crowd, there are likely between 3% and 15% sociopaths depending on who you ask, 1 in 10, likely much more in achievers' social circles (because sociopaths are fundamentally not average statistically and tend to outperform the rest of us).
Now you just have to look at your reality and map these numbers. The mediocrity principle probably applies to most of us.
>bold vision, extreme self-confidence, and determination to win
These are not narcissistic characteristics on their own. More like positive attributes on their own.
OTOH
>They tend to seek power and they are very good at convincing the people above them that they deserve it.
>entitlement, hostility when challenged, and a willingness to manipulate — are seen as part of the package.
These are not positive attributes, instead they are characteristics narcissists use to create a facade of the former.
When you accept the latter as part of a supposedly worthwhile package you are not doing a careful enough evaluation.
Plus
>Isn't narcissism among those who rise to an executive rank at some point in their career more the norm rather than the exception?
Common enough to have given rise to the stereotype.
The damage depends on the organization.
When _People Are Our Biggest Asset_ the loss in value can be more devastating than resource-oriented or hard-asset companies, even when growth appears visible, the unrealized possibilities can be more significant than shareholder returns in a capitalist venture.
Tragically all the narcissists are on there with their selfies hopelessly looking for love from all the other narcissists psychologically unable to give it.
There was a time it was not so common a trait. I distinctly remember the 70's and 80's when there were a large number of people who I would say "lacked confidence" so to speak. Kind of unsure of themselves, shy and retiring types.
As we moved into the 21st century, it does seem like lack of confidence has gone away. People are almost "over confident" sometimes.
Is it possible that people are by and large the same, but that social media simply makes it very easy for people lacking confidence to come across as more confident than they really are?
Empathy is overrated and is actually part of the problem sometimes. People are wired to feel empathy for members of their ingroup and to not feel empathy for members of their outgroup, so relying too much on empathy just creates a collection of divided subcultures, which is what the Internet really looks like to me.
I feel empathy for even nonhuman animals, so yes I agree sometimes it can be a problem. Especially when empathizing with psychopaths and sociopaths. They have the worst feelings of all.
There is a concept of healthy narcissism in therapeutic circles. Everybody is somewhat narcissistic and making sure it is not a negative aspect of one's life is the key. The pop psych model is an easy label.
The whole thing is a descriptive generality, defining someone's character is difficult.
The description in the article of what narcissism is isn't great. The article doesn't even describe the difference between NPD (narcissistic personality disorder) and narcissism in philosophy.
Narcissism (NPD) is telling a story to get other people to do what they want. Usually the story they tell is a lie or some form of twisting the truth. For example imagine you ask a coworker how they're doing and they say something like, "Not so good. I just finished a meeting and Bob treated me horribly. He kept talking over me and I felt like I couldn't get my ideas out."
The story seems normal enough. The average person doesn't keep track of what they've heard that is verified and unverified. Say, in this case, the narcissist is not telling the truth about Bob. They're spreading gossip with the goal of getting Bob fired months later, in this slow and subtle way. Worst of all, Bob has no idea. There hasn't been any arguments or any problems between them. There is a high chance he will not know what has happened until it is already over. What does the person with NPD want here? Maybe a promotion or something else that they are likely to get if Bob leaves the company.
Narcissists also use positive emotions when and where possible to aid their stories. Positive roles like being a loved one, a good friend, or a leader are the kinds of roles people question the least. This allows their stories to go unverified, giving them everything they want.
There is a line that connects NPD and ASPD (sociopath/psychopath). Many who suffer from NPD and ASPD have a blend of traits between the two. What both narcissists and sociopaths want is selfish, in that they're okay harming others to get what they want, as long as they can do it in a way that isn't obvious. People with ASPD tend to be forward and obvious and get caught. People with NPD tend to be more sly and subtle and rarely get caught.
I'm not one to usually bring politics up, but Trump is a great example of NPD, because of how obvious he is. If you watch what he says with the lens of looking for twisted truth or outright lies, and look for his motivation guessing what he wants, it becomes quite a bit easier to understand not only where he is coming from but how he works and what his tricks are.
Are you purposely excluding the "250 MBA students taking coauthor Chatman’s course on leadership at UC Berkeley" plus the "nearly 900 business school alumni from Stanford, Santa Clara University, and UC Berkeley who worked at 56 large, publicly traded high-tech firms based in the United States"?
I definitely agree with the premise of the article that narcissism takes away value instead of adding value.
Being calculative, cold and even disloyal at an individual level does not make someone a narcissist, it can be a very altruistic and idealistic thing in fact. For example, firing untalented employees to make room for more talented, hard working ones is altruistic IMO. If everyone did this, the system would work really well and everyone would be better off (even the lazy, untalented people would be better off thanks to universal improvements in productivity).
I think nepotism is a huge problem now. At scale, loyalty to specific individuals can be downright evil. Loyalty must only be given on the basis of shared values and principles.
Criminals can be extremely loyal to each other but they have no shared values aside from mutual self-preservation.
I’m about to go through a series of job interviews. Any tips on determining whether potential future managers or coworkers are narcissists? Seems like it can be hard to suss this out without some longer-term exposure.
Not really, you just need to know what to look for. A shallow, materialistic person with very little sense of humor, curiosity of the social/intellectual/cultural/creative kind, or visibly empathetic interest in others is a big red flag. The "curiosity" part may well be the easiest to assess as an observer, because it's not something that can be faked easily.
NPD (narcissistic personality disorder) is complex and while it is possible to have a good eye for identifying them, it's nearly impossible to tell during job interview.
Thankfully, most people with NPD want to live off of others for free, so the majority of narcissists are not in the work place.
However, there are other not-so-great types that are more common in the work place. At the end of the day learning the ideal way to handle conflict (including with an abusive boss) is a productive endeavor, because that knowledge helps with many difficult situations. A master key of sorts is both how to handle conflict and how to identify dangerous people.
For more information on how to identify them this comment I just wrote explains where they are coming from to a decent degree of detail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21494295
It helps to identify what people around you want, understand how manipulation works, and to not blindly believe stories. Most people believe or disbelieve what they hear. Having a third category that keeps track of unverified information helps identify when someone starts lying. Narcissists lie quite a bit, but they're not compulsive liars either. Sometimes it will take years to catch on.
I like that the semi-obvious research is being done because it moves the conversation forward and helps avoid complacency and shrugging-of-shoulders. Changing the status-quo can be about mindsets, not just product.
Next step is focusing on solutions for/around narcissist leaders.
Also great to see Hacker News supporting these non-engineering business topics as well.
Recent experience has led me to wonder whether narcissistic founders are more likely to succeed. Their self-confidence makes them less likely to give up. When they they have some success through luck or effort from others they will attribute the success to themselves and keep going, creating a positive feedback loop for themselves, but a pretty toxic environment for everyone else involved. Any employees questioning the narcissist will have a bad time.
I think they describe it here: "They asked more than 250 MBA students taking coauthor Chatman’s course on leadership at UC Berkeley to provide names for at least three current or former coworkers, who then confidentially rated the students on measures of narcissism."
And here: "Researchers surveyed nearly 900 business school alumni... who worked at 56 large, publicly traded high-tech firms... Alumni completed surveys to evaluate their CEO’s personality type and organizational cultures."
Sure it's a little subjective like anything based on societal norms, but there are generally accepted behavior models/characteristics around personality types across medical fields.
And I imagine the questions were nuanced and sophisticated enough that they weren’t as basic “is your boss an asshole” and more like “on a scale of 1 being Spock to 10 being Trump, how does your boss handle conflict?”
The only thing important for a CEO is their effect on bottom line and stock price. If the effect is that people collaborate less, but results go up, maybe more collaboration is not necessarily always positive. So in my opinion, just using these metrics and no economical metrics gives no useful answer for those who need to hire a CEO. On a further note, the tendency to blame things on other people's personality types is akin to a modern-day astrology.
> The only thing important for a CEO is their effect on bottom line and stock price.
What? No. Legally that may be true for C-corps, but AFAIK that's explicitly why people started doing B-corps; to have other metrics of success than just those two. And even for C-corps, doesn't it still depend on what the shareholders want?
And after all that, you've still got to consider that if you're only looking at "ends justify means", well, why do you think you're at an end and can even measure it?
Ignoring the ethics of hiring someone that almost certainly will cause psychological trauma to their colleagues, I just want to say that narcissism is hardly a "personality type".
What time scale? The bottom line next quarter? 3 years from now? 10 years from now? 20 years from now?
If it is impossible to plan precisely enough to determine the bottom line 20 years from now, perhaps fostering a dynamic, healthy culture with a powerful vision is a more effective way of creating a successful company than narrowly looking only at the amount of profits. Obviously, the business model must be considered. But a business model with no value system or vision will likely crumble as conditions change.
> The only thing important for a CEO is their effect on bottom line and stock price...
People are just tired of assholery, ok.
It's not like greed is new. It's always been a part of human experience, usually bad, and especially so when it becomes extractive and monopolistic. But there's something about "tech" startups that seems to attract the most awful personalities into c-level leadership.
I expect railroad and oil tycoons were much the same in their day. I don't expect anything to be different in the tech industry.
Yeah, loser narcissists are the worst. Pay very little. Fake worse than the Kardashians. Lie, manipulate, bullshit, boast, play favourites at every turn at every turn.
89 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadThe article correctly points out some of the direct economic damage. It ignores the significant damage to people done by abusive narcissists; from personal experience I can say it's substantial. You can see that in the interviews with WeWork employees.
But another kind of damage is what they prevent from existing. Kalanick was aggressive in killing competition; Lyft was the only one he couldn't spend into the grave. Neumann has deeply distorted the market for coworking. Or we could look at Zuckerberg [1]; what kind of open social networks could we have ended up with if he hadn't ruthlessly pursued a personally-dominated monopoly?
[1] http://www.afterpsychotherapy.com/narcissistic-personality-d...
At least for VC-backed direct competition, nothing of value is lost. The business is commodity - driving people around in cars, delivering food, renting office space, offering rides on e-scooters, running under-the-table hotels, whatever. All that the insane amounts of VC enable is network effects and marketplace dominance - people don't call a pizza shop or a cab company any more, they open the Delivery Hero or Uber apps. But someone still has to make the pizza or drive the cab, which means until fully automated driving is reality, there is no direct loss in jobs.
The more interesting things are rather the "competition" that is entrenched companies... most obvious in taxis. Usually, taxis are regulated (meaning, their cars have appropriate insurance, silent alarm devices in case the driver gets robbed, and most importantly mandatory service areas and times). Uber/Lyft etc. can now pick the profitable cherries (airport transfers, drunk partygoers on Friday/Saturday) and leave the unprofitable times or areas to the regular cabs - who cannot run at an overall profit anymore as the business/hipster clientele is now using Uber/Lyft. Who suffers? Entire communities now underserved by taxis, old people (who don't have smartphones)... but no one really looks at which negative impact his/her company will have on minorities.
But instead we get supposedly hyper-rational arguments that are pretty clearly highly emotional. And then when the wheels come off, the support just evaporates, with nary a "mea culpa", let alone a "here's how WeWork fooled me" post.
It's just exhausting sometimes.
There are two fundamental arguments of the self: additive and subtractive.
The additive argument is called love. It tells us to add to the self.
The subtractive argument is called disgust. It tells us to remove from the self.
Codependents are addicted to the chemical rewards of love, while narcissists are addicted to the chemical rewards of disgust.
Narcissists therefore have an overwhelming need to eject things as "not good enough" from their extended self. If I tell a stranger his haircut looks stupid, I don't get a disgust reward. If I tell my son that, I do get the reward because he is part of my extended self.
Basically, narcissists have extremely high standards for themselves. They want to become fast friends because they want (need, really) to share that terrible burden.
You can't police feelings into evidence of pathology. Some people are more disgust sensitive than others. There is light and dark to everything, including love and disgust.
If you're addicted to a feeling then that is a pathology. You're right that love and disgust can both be good or bad, but nobody said otherwise.
>You're right that love and disgust can both be good or bad, but nobody said otherwise
You did when you made disgust a fundamental negative and love a fundamental positive. But whatever.
>If you're addicted to a feeling then that is a pathology.
Not necessarily, some people deliberately go through bad feelings for the sake of getting to the bottom of something and integrating that answer. That can seem like an addiction from the outside.
You do you.
I said subtractive and additive. Chiseling is subtractive. Do you think chiseling is fundamentally negative?
What point are you trying to make with your "bad feelings" comment? That narcissists are actually fiercely introspective? What are you even on about?
You say "You do you" but you're the one who butted in. Next time, first know what you're talking about.
You said: "There are two fundamental arguments of the self"
You conflated criticizing haircuts with a disgust reward and constructed a view on narcissists that is defined by feelings nearly everyone feels. Your view on feelings is too limited to identify a narcissist, as demonstrated by the idea that you can go through feelings and appear to be an addict from outside, but not be one.
Butted in to what? A public thread?
The mask idea comes from psychology. A narcissist suffers narcissitic wounds at an early age and learns to develop a false persona to please abusive parents instead of a healthy self that grows over time. They stay locked in a cycle of abuse trying to escape past trauma instead of dealing with it and it is unleashed on those around them when the tension becomes too much. They frequently rely on charm and a single talent to get them achievements to please said relationship and are found to be brittle or liars when challenged. They will suck the life-force out of others to fuel their own lack of a self. There is a whole bunch of psychological information on this.
This all has an overlap with the external version of the story, the narcissus myth. Narcissus is a spirit that embodies the story of self love, being so captivating to some. He has multiple outcomes. In one he captures the attention of another so completely that their life becomes drained away and the adorer becomes no more than an echo in a forest, which mirrors the fueling the self & abuse cycle from psychology. In another part he sees his reflection in a pool and becomes unable to leave his own reflection and eventually suicides or recognizes that the love cannot be reciprocated and becomes a flower, which mirrors a lot of the empathy focused therapy techniques.
Now that person is a senior director at Google. Good luck to anyone affected! I am still thinking I should have destroyed him back then and stop the tumor right in the beginning...
No surprise there. A fish rots from the head down.
Jobs was a textbook Narcissist.
Can you please point out some of the many ways he was supposedly manipulating people to run a business better, and how they aren't a byproduct of narcissism?
https://www.cultofmac.com/2613/steve-jobs-still-parking-in-h...
I’ve worked in places where executives had to be narcissistic or sociopaths just to survive. People with intact emotions have difficulty coping with the toxicity.
Most places aren’t like that.
Nonetheless chose to in the first place, insofar as nobody's forcing anyone to climb the exec ladder, and there are lots of places to do it — in fact, it requires several in a career usually, to reach the highest ranks, unless it's a familial-type affair.
“God laughs at those who deplore the effects of which causes they cherish.” (Bossuet)
I have this general KPI for myself: if it makes me become a worse human being, then it's bad for me, thus I should either run away the other direction, or buckle up and change things. It can't be ignored or 'endured' for it's the 'bad' kind of pain, the kind that doesn't make you grow but just eats at you. The kind that commands you to fight or flee but certainly not freeze.
And you're right, most places aren't like that. I never forget that >90% of businesses in most rich countries employ less than 10 people. Also know that in an average crowd, there are likely between 3% and 15% sociopaths depending on who you ask, 1 in 10, likely much more in achievers' social circles (because sociopaths are fundamentally not average statistically and tend to outperform the rest of us).
Now you just have to look at your reality and map these numbers. The mediocrity principle probably applies to most of us.
These are not narcissistic characteristics on their own. More like positive attributes on their own.
OTOH
>They tend to seek power and they are very good at convincing the people above them that they deserve it.
>entitlement, hostility when challenged, and a willingness to manipulate — are seen as part of the package.
These are not positive attributes, instead they are characteristics narcissists use to create a facade of the former.
When you accept the latter as part of a supposedly worthwhile package you are not doing a careful enough evaluation.
Plus
>Isn't narcissism among those who rise to an executive rank at some point in their career more the norm rather than the exception?
Common enough to have given rise to the stereotype.
The damage depends on the organization.
When _People Are Our Biggest Asset_ the loss in value can be more devastating than resource-oriented or hard-asset companies, even when growth appears visible, the unrealized possibilities can be more significant than shareholder returns in a capitalist venture.
As we moved into the 21st century, it does seem like lack of confidence has gone away. People are almost "over confident" sometimes.
Is it possible that people are by and large the same, but that social media simply makes it very easy for people lacking confidence to come across as more confident than they really are?
The whole thing is a descriptive generality, defining someone's character is difficult.
Narcissism (NPD) is telling a story to get other people to do what they want. Usually the story they tell is a lie or some form of twisting the truth. For example imagine you ask a coworker how they're doing and they say something like, "Not so good. I just finished a meeting and Bob treated me horribly. He kept talking over me and I felt like I couldn't get my ideas out."
The story seems normal enough. The average person doesn't keep track of what they've heard that is verified and unverified. Say, in this case, the narcissist is not telling the truth about Bob. They're spreading gossip with the goal of getting Bob fired months later, in this slow and subtle way. Worst of all, Bob has no idea. There hasn't been any arguments or any problems between them. There is a high chance he will not know what has happened until it is already over. What does the person with NPD want here? Maybe a promotion or something else that they are likely to get if Bob leaves the company.
Narcissists also use positive emotions when and where possible to aid their stories. Positive roles like being a loved one, a good friend, or a leader are the kinds of roles people question the least. This allows their stories to go unverified, giving them everything they want.
There is a line that connects NPD and ASPD (sociopath/psychopath). Many who suffer from NPD and ASPD have a blend of traits between the two. What both narcissists and sociopaths want is selfish, in that they're okay harming others to get what they want, as long as they can do it in a way that isn't obvious. People with ASPD tend to be forward and obvious and get caught. People with NPD tend to be more sly and subtle and rarely get caught.
I'm not one to usually bring politics up, but Trump is a great example of NPD, because of how obvious he is. If you watch what he says with the lens of looking for twisted truth or outright lies, and look for his motivation guessing what he wants, it becomes quite a bit easier to understand not only where he is coming from but how he works and what his tricks are.
The rest seems quite solid.
Being calculative, cold and even disloyal at an individual level does not make someone a narcissist, it can be a very altruistic and idealistic thing in fact. For example, firing untalented employees to make room for more talented, hard working ones is altruistic IMO. If everyone did this, the system would work really well and everyone would be better off (even the lazy, untalented people would be better off thanks to universal improvements in productivity).
I think nepotism is a huge problem now. At scale, loyalty to specific individuals can be downright evil. Loyalty must only be given on the basis of shared values and principles.
Criminals can be extremely loyal to each other but they have no shared values aside from mutual self-preservation.
Ask them to tell a joke. Do they do it right?
http://hintjens.com/blog:_psychopaths
A red flag is when you cannot make a distinction between your personal achievements and your team achievements.
- Very attuned to their own fashion attire. Very well/trendy dressed.
- Use the words/phrases “value”, “add value”
- Brag about themselves a lot. Talk about very lofty standards about very minor details.
Not really, you just need to know what to look for. A shallow, materialistic person with very little sense of humor, curiosity of the social/intellectual/cultural/creative kind, or visibly empathetic interest in others is a big red flag. The "curiosity" part may well be the easiest to assess as an observer, because it's not something that can be faked easily.
I have adopted a heuristic from experience that so far has a 100% success rate in detecting psych issues in women:
Women that majored in Psychology are women you dont want in your life.
Make of that what you will.
Thankfully, most people with NPD want to live off of others for free, so the majority of narcissists are not in the work place.
However, there are other not-so-great types that are more common in the work place. At the end of the day learning the ideal way to handle conflict (including with an abusive boss) is a productive endeavor, because that knowledge helps with many difficult situations. A master key of sorts is both how to handle conflict and how to identify dangerous people.
For more information on how to identify them this comment I just wrote explains where they are coming from to a decent degree of detail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21494295
It helps to identify what people around you want, understand how manipulation works, and to not blindly believe stories. Most people believe or disbelieve what they hear. Having a third category that keeps track of unverified information helps identify when someone starts lying. Narcissists lie quite a bit, but they're not compulsive liars either. Sometimes it will take years to catch on.
For how to handle difficult situations, the book In Sheep's Clothing is a quicker read that most books and dives into how to respond to ASPDs and NPDs in the work place: https://www.amazon.com/Sheeps-Clothing-Understanding-Dealing...
Next step is focusing on solutions for/around narcissist leaders.
Also great to see Hacker News supporting these non-engineering business topics as well.
And here: "Researchers surveyed nearly 900 business school alumni... who worked at 56 large, publicly traded high-tech firms... Alumni completed surveys to evaluate their CEO’s personality type and organizational cultures."
Sure it's a little subjective like anything based on societal norms, but there are generally accepted behavior models/characteristics around personality types across medical fields.
Of which probably none of those surveyed are trained to recognize.
Heres a typical response: My boss is an asshole thats why everything went to shit. Is he narcissist? Oh yea big time.
And I imagine the questions were nuanced and sophisticated enough that they weren’t as basic “is your boss an asshole” and more like “on a scale of 1 being Spock to 10 being Trump, how does your boss handle conflict?”
What? No. Legally that may be true for C-corps, but AFAIK that's explicitly why people started doing B-corps; to have other metrics of success than just those two. And even for C-corps, doesn't it still depend on what the shareholders want?
And after all that, you've still got to consider that if you're only looking at "ends justify means", well, why do you think you're at an end and can even measure it?
If it is impossible to plan precisely enough to determine the bottom line 20 years from now, perhaps fostering a dynamic, healthy culture with a powerful vision is a more effective way of creating a successful company than narrowly looking only at the amount of profits. Obviously, the business model must be considered. But a business model with no value system or vision will likely crumble as conditions change.
People are just tired of assholery, ok.
It's not like greed is new. It's always been a part of human experience, usually bad, and especially so when it becomes extractive and monopolistic. But there's something about "tech" startups that seems to attract the most awful personalities into c-level leadership.
I expect railroad and oil tycoons were much the same in their day. I don't expect anything to be different in the tech industry.