Actually, you'd be surprised. I'm taking the "jerk" definition to mean a sense of self-entitlement and sense of power.
You don't need to be a jerk and eat the last cookie but having a strong sense of "alpha" confidence in most interview-like situation pays off really well.
Next time you have an interview (or a one-on-one or a salesy meeting), try to exude some sense of power[0] (don't overdo it!) and see how the other person reacts. I know that it blew my mind the first few times I tried it.
As an aside, it's crazy to me that we engineers are so focused on hacking systems but seem to denigrate hacking personal interactions as if it's something dirty/beneath us.
>Measuring narcissism was tricky, Hambrick said. Self-reporting was not exactly an option, so he chose a set of indirect measures: the prominence of each CEO’s picture in the company’s annual report; the size of the CEO’s paycheck compared with that of the next-highest-paid person in the company; the frequency with which the CEO’s name appeared in company press releases. Lastly, he looked at the CEO’s use of pronouns in press interviews, comparing the frequency of the first-person plural with that of the first-person singular. Then he rolled all the results into a single narcissism indicator.
It must be nice to be able to just make up and use a method for identifying "narcissists" without having to test whether the people you're identifying as narcissists are, in fact, narcissists. In my opinion, if this is how you do research you can hardly call what you do science.
True, and the "first person singular = narcissism" equation that this makes struck me as strongly inappropriate. With this metric, a CEO who takes personal responsibility (e.g. "I instructed the finance department to do X, and I'm sorry about that but it is a necessity for reasons Y and Z") is going to be identified as a narcissist compared to the one who hides behind words weasel words like ("We architected and rolled out a brand new program, which we hope you will like very much (not)").
If that is your measure of narcissism, then it's fine -- but it should probably be called something else. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the first CEO in the above example was more successful than the second.
We have to keep up with the game. There's a recent (maybe not lol) prevalence of narcisstic people who love to avoid using personal pronouns and turn up the false objectivity.
As a former psychology researcher, I would hazard, that like any decent, published, study, they validated their measurements before using them. Minutiae like this is often missed in the press description.
It's not usually mentioned there. The length of the abstract is usually limited by the publishing journal - it can often be as little as 100-150 words.
Yeah the first person pronoun prevlaence could just as well be a sign of personal writing style or a very non-narcissistic sense of social responsibility in wanting to be absolutely clear about what one did.
I agree. At one of my previous employers, managers loved to casually mention the CEO's name in conversation and in emails in order to not only sound more authoritative and in-the-know, but also nip any disagreements in the bud. The CEO wasn't a narcissist at all, but if this study was conducted there they would inevitably be labeled as such.
Reminds me of that recent article that the best way to identify a narcissist is to just ask them (true narcissists will readily admit it). That line in Patton (probably my favorite movie) where he says "Hell, I know I'm a prima donna. I admit it."
Still does not pay to be an asshole though. If you want to call them assholes - I believe Jobs and Patton would have been just as successful if they had not been. But their legacies are (maybe forever) tarnished because of it.
Patton could have just as easily not gotten the chance to stage his magnificent campaign across Europe - just because of an "asshole" move. It wasn't worth it. Proves that people do still care about how others are treated.
well according to the article it does; both "givers" and "assholes" have a u-shaped distribution curve: they tend to do either very well or very badly. Jobs and Patton could have been givers with the same results, or even better. And the article even points out that Jobs had significantly reduced his asshole tendencies during the more successful part of his career.
"Being nice" doesn't get you anywhere, but that's not the same as being a giver.
what research? there's hardly anything in the article to suggest that it exceeds the quality of a 2AM red bull fueld college paper written by a student.
I think it's funny we think we can pick-and-choose. "If only Patton had been just as great but less of an asshole". What if that was an important part of making him the great leader he was? Traditionally negative traits can sometimes contribute to effective leadership.
the slapping incidents were an example to Eisenhower, Marshall, and other leaders of Patton's brashness and impulsiveness
His most successful and famous campaigns can be described as brash and impulsive!
I was an Oracle Product Manager for the core database. Larry would often offer to be available for anything that might raise the profile of Oracle. He also solicited suggestions for anything high-profile to get involved with - sports, causes, whatever. He said that his goal was to be someone who could call any CEO in the world, and no matter how much that CEO might hate Oracle, the CEO would still take his call. And if the CEO took his call then Larry would use his wealth in any way possible to make the sale.
Larry is guilty of a lot of things - but his high profile was very calculated and served business interests.
I have an answer you won't expect: I had been a PM, and I was invited to a meeting. When I arrived, it was a small conference room with the lights out and two very serious guys in suits. I went in, sat down, and asked who else we were expecting, and what the meeting was about. They replied that no one else was expected. Then I was asked if I'd seen the paper that morning. I had, and the front page said that Oracle had just purchased a well-known company. They explained that my name had come up as someone to lead the new acquisition.
So I asked why we bought it. I was told that Larry took any opportunity to buy a potential competitor. My role would be to spend perhaps a year understanding their technology deeply. Then some number of months creating an integration plan for any technology we might want to keep. Then managing an Oracle team responsible for integrating the technology into Oracle products. And finally winding down the company.
Well, I've spent my entire career creating things. And now I was being asked to destroy things. So I thought "Is this what I want to do?". So I turned down an offer that was really coming from Larry and senior management - I figured it was time to go.
(This was over 10 years ago - Larry was still very involved.)
Back when Larry was offering to invest in companies I was thinking of starting, I asked him whether it was more important to be liked or respected. He surprised me by saying, with apparent sincerity, "liked".
What inspired me to ask is that John Cullinane had earlier volunteered the same question to me, and given the opposite answer, which also surprised me.
This was all in the late 1980s. And it was a staple of my conversations with Larry that he blast other people, commonly in quite humorous terms.
Larry's also the person who first told me of the bit about almost everybody thinking they were above average ...
Hi Curt
Curious to know why you think Larry stepped down as CEO recently.
Also curious to know if you think Oracle will continue to thrive as a company and what it's biggest threat is today.
Why I am hardly a defender of the social sciences this is exactly how you are supposed to do this. You create a hypothesis and then you test to see if it correlates with the effect you are interested in. You of course should not develop your hypothesis and test on the same set of subjects or else you just end up with garbage.
Of course there is still the slight problem of determining whatever correlates you have found actually correlate with an abstract state like narcissism.
>It must be nice to be able to just make up and use a method for identifying "narcissists" without having to test whether the people you're identifying as narcissists are, in fact, narcissists. In my opinion, if this is how you do research you can hardly call what you do science.
This is rampant in socio/psycho academia and professionals. Not saying ALL of them are like this but in general, it is not a quantitative or strictly scientific field. Lot of the work done in this industry is self-fulfilling prophecies and their time is mostly spent on fabricating/bending truths and hard facts and say "here's a statistically significant outcome therefore assholes are great leaders".
It's laughable and I've stopped reading the article because I felt like it's built on the same shoddy science work and poor understanding of statistics and it's significance.
How would you identify if someone is in fact a narcissist? What does it mean to be a narcissist?
The problem with words is that people think they have a specific meaning. He created one for his study -- narcissism is defined as some weighted combination of those metrics.
What you describe is verbal sleight of hand. With one hand, one pretends the word "narcissist" has only the precise meaning of the paper, and with the other hand one does not shy away from using that word outside its context, so that everyone, including readers of this article, think of the common accepted meaning.
Certain qualities like narcissism are not measurable precisely, so he created the next best thing, which is precisely defined according to a formula, and, hopefully, correlates highly with true narcissism. This is exactly how do you social science research
for example, if you wanted to do research on whether or not smarter CEOs increase shareholder value, how would you go about it ? Intelligence is hard to measure, but we know things like test scores correlate with it to some degree. So, maybe, you would see how well companies do against CEO SAT scores or undergraduate institution they attended or their high school gpa
Then you have to admit that measuring correlation between "smarter CEOs" and "shareholder value" is impossible and measure correlation between "CEO SAT scores" and "shareholder value" instead. Yeah, not that click-baity, but that would be a real study, unlike this one.
Consider two independent fair die rolls, with A and C being the outcomes. Let B be the sum of the outcomes. The higher A is, the higher B is likely to be, so A and B are positively correlated. So are B and C. However there is no correlation between A and C as they are independent.
>which is precisely defined according to a formula, and, hopefully, correlates highly with true narcissism.
Yeah, that was his point. Hope doesn't cut it. You kind of have to go off and prove your formula does correlate highly with true narcissism, not just skip on to the next step.
How did I know that there would be a comment like this at the top, someone criticizing the research for not being science?
What is wrong with making up and using a narcissism metric and seeing what it correlates with? It's how social science is done, and how you discover results that are worth exploring. Get off your high horse.
Erm, because the first thing a real scientist would do would be to test the narcissism metric and check that it does, you know, actually correlate with narcissism? You can't just invent metrics and hope that they work.
> It's how social science is done, and how you discover results that are worth exploring.
Do you see the problem here? If you invent metrics, assume they work, then only pursue the ones that produce results "worth exploring"... can you see the problem?
How would you do that check if the metric the author chose was the best he could come up with to measure the quality of narcissism? If you want to check your metric correlates with narcissism, what metric B do you check your metric
A for correlation with?
Well, obviously there are more painstaking and accurate ways of determining whether a person is a narcissist. No doubt this is hard work. Sit down, talk with them, ask their employees, etc. Do the really hard work for a subset, check that the subset you've tested correlates well to your made-up metric, and only then can you use the made-up metric. You can't just use it without any evidence it works.
What you're describing is just as 'made up' as the metric you're opposing - your 'hard yards' are still based on people's opinions, politicking, and ulterior motives.
Keep in mind that even the GP's original quote included at least two references to the difficulty in measuring the trait ('tricky' and 'had to use indirect measures'). It's not like the researcher boldly strode forth and said "This is the way, have faith!". The results are also suitably couched. It seems like this "bad science!" thread is making a mountain out of a molehill.
>What you're describing is just as 'made up' as the metric you're opposing
So are you telling me that the very best way we have of establishing narcissism is the "the frequency with which the CEO’s name appeared in company press releases"??
If not, then a scientist is required to either:
a) Use the best method.
or...
b) Develop a proxy and calibrate it against the best method.
You can't just postulate a proxy for narcissism out of thin fucking air and then use it.
Nice false dichotomy there. Where did I say it was "the very best way"? And I can see just as many ways for your suggestion to be corrupted as the method in question. If it 'scares you that you have to explain this', then you should be offering some actual method that is good as you demand, because what you offered is, frankly, subject to terrible bias on the part of the respondants, and still has the bias of the researcher in deciding what means what.
Your method much less robust than the method in the article, and it might not even get past an ethics committee, for that matter - formally questioning people about whether their boss was up themselves? Think about how could that possibly backfire and significantly harm the subjects. Where would you question them - at the workplace as a job lot? Or would you track them individually outside of work, where these kinds of questions about the boss could now be seen as an organised attempt at harrassment, given the effort required?
This was an exploratory study trying something out, with explicit mention that the measures were indirect. It's not like there's an international treaty being based on it. Calm the fuck down.
It is the easiest thing in the world to read about a scientific study and then hand-wave about how it should have been done better. Actually doing a study is quite a bit harder, for all the typical reasons that things are harder to get done in real life than on paper.
To pick at one example, do you think it is easy to get time to just sit down and talk with a CEO or their employees? Particularly when the subject of your research is how narcissistic the CEO might be?
If that's how social science is done, then the "science" part should be dropped. My guess is that social scientists are (hopefully) more rigorous than that.
The funny thing is that there already is real science about how to evaluate an individual's narcissism. Just looking at Wikipedia could have helped that guy a lot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism
Correlating CEO paycheck with corporate success seems especially dubious. You could find an association simply because the CEO was effective and the board wanted to reward the CEO with higher pay. It would have nothing to do with narcissism.
People who are nice, team players, selfless, etc. cluster near the top and the bottom of our hypothetical payscale graph.
People who are narcissistic, egotistical, entitled, and overall "assholes" also cluster near the top and the bottom of payscale graph.
But their data on narcissists only comes from CEOs?
I would suggest that in aggregate this tells us basically nothing about how one should act to get ahead (Except maybe "Avoid the middle road of only being an asshole sometimes?").
It does however suggest that narcissism might be more common among CEOs than in the general populace, although again, not a predictor of being a particularly successful one.
This is all of course setting aside the obvious problems of "How are they even defining these nebulous categories (In the case of narcissism, their measures were pretty unconvincing IMO. A lot of those decisions could have been made by marketing/PR people. There's sometimes value in the 'personal brand' of your CEO, even if they themselves are pretty humble in attitude) and even if we believe their definitions, how could they possibly be measuring them in a rigorous way in the wild"
It is true in American culture. It is not true in European (not sure about Asian) culture. Try putting your shoes on the table in Europe at the same time claiming credit for someone's else work in Paris or Berlin.
The difference is a cultural one. Americans don't complain when they see or experience injustice or poor behavior. Nobody will talk to a jerk like this in Europe.Or actually he will hear something. Like: "Can you take your shoes from the table Mr. Important? You are not at home! BTW, Jane did this work, not you, why are you claiming credit for her work?" I can't imagine someone telling something like this to a jerk in the US. At the same time I can't imagine someone not telling something like this to a jerk in Europe.
Also, never have seen so much politics and self-praise as in the US.
But then again, maybe a strict culture that puts everyone in their respective place, is the reason why we don't get Steve Jobs or Bill Gates success stories.
As a so called 'European', I'm kind of shocked/dubious that this would also be acceptable in American culture.
My guess is most people would agree that if you put your feet on the table and take credit where it isn't due then you're probably an ahole. But this is a stereotype of the typical 'jerk'.
It's the jerks that 'play the game' and aren't necessarily blatant that do (perhaps unfairly) well.
As an American who has spend a good amount of time in Europe, I've noticed a cultural difference that may be relevant.
Almost universally, Europeans take their shoes off when entering a home. As a guest, it is expected, and failing to do so unless specifically instructed not to is rude. A majority of Americans I know do not take their shoes off at home and guests are not expected to unless specifically asked or given some cue.
Feet on a desk in an office would be considered rude in both Europe and the US, however, I have a suspicion it's considerably more rude in Europe.
> Almost universally, Europeans take their shoes off when entering a home.
Utter bullshit.
I'm sorry, but I have no more subtle response to such clueless arrogant pontificating prefaced with the typical "as an American who has spend a good amount of time in Europe".
If you had bothered to even superficially explore a single small country on the continent, you wouldn't have such a naive uninformed notion of European cultural diversity.
For you information: any such very, very, specific cultural habit, from taking of your shoes to how you have dinner, is almost certainly nowhere near "universally" true within any given European country (which historically tend to contain multiple cultures), let alone the entire continent.
I dunno, there's a good moral argument for giving a fairly mild ration of shit to somebody who insists on using a little experience to draw sweeping conclusions. It happens so commonly and so persistently that I do think a little bit of applied loss of face might be helpful. Hot stoves and all that.
I understand the sentiment but isn't the web confrontational enough already? I always think of the people on the sidelines who might be lurkers, interested in engaging the community, contributing, whatever and who read those kinds of comments, thinking: "There's no room for error, those people are really aggressive". It's just computers, nothing life-threatening so I like it when we keep it as civil as possible.
I lived for a substantial amount of time in Ireland and France, and absolutely no indication that this is the case, at all. More prevalent in SF than Dublin or Paris.
I don't even think that it's true in American culture, except perhaps in Silicon Valley, which is a toxic outlier, and in a small sliver of Wall Street that still has the excessive 1980s culture. (Most Wall Street jobs are in professional environments, these days.)
Try putting your shoes on the table in Europe at the same time claiming credit for someone's else work in Paris or Berlin.
Taking credit is a dick move anywhere, and if you get called on it, no one will respect you. The credit-takers who get away with it are the ones who do it in a way hat they won't get called out.
Feet on the desk or table would definitely make a person disliked in most companies. Again, Silicon Valley is an outlier, and the obnoxious Wall Street culture is pretty much extinct because most of the "alpha trader" jobs have been automated.
Also, never have seen so much politics and self-praise as in the US.
There is more tolerance (if not requirement, to some degree) for self-promotion in the US, and that's especially true of Silicon Valley. It's fairly regional, to tell the truth. The sort of person who gets funded in the Valley would be considered an overconfident tool in New York and be actively disliked in Chicago (as in, presumably, most of Europe).
That said, I know some people who've worked at Rocket Internet companies and the Samwers seem to take the stereotypically American boorishness to a whole new level.
I'm European and once put my feet on the table when talking to a collegue on the phone. I did it because I was curious of people's reaction. Another colleague saw it and she was stunned to say that least. I quickly apologized, but that's a heck of a cultural difference spanning across the pond.
Right, American culture (or the lack of it) definitely represents a tradeoff. Strong culture has an effect of reducing anxieties; you know your place by participating. You probably won't do too well, but not too bad either. In contrast, American culture almost prides itself on not participating, and "forging your own path", non-conformity is the new conformity, etc.
The results are that it will be easier to do thing like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, but at the same time easier to miss the mark even more and shoot up schools (Not saying that is an exclusively American phenomenon though).
I personally think the tradeoff is worth it. It's like being given a piano versus a "make music automatically!" iPad app. I will take the piano despite the much greater possibility of making mistakes, for the chance to make something that sounds much better.
Although this weak culture leads to some other problems, like the not complaining when they see injustice. It's that it is more difficult to develop your instincts for dealing with injustive when you don't know the expectations and rituals of the group(s) in which you are participating.
>In contrast, American culture almost prides itself on not participating, and "forging your own path", non-conformity is the new conformity, etc.
IMHO, this is mostly a presentation of non-conformity. In my experience, having lived half my life in the US and half of it elsewhere, non-conformity is punished much more severely here than in western europe. You even get ostracized here for having a different concept of what non-conformity involves.
The US has a very limited concept of individualism, which seems to overlap significantly with "success" defined purely in financial terms, or as some form of force projection - either charismatic and persuasive, seductive, violent, or all three.
If you look at the US media, there's almost no coverage at all of other ethical systems and other forms of individuality.
The closest thing to a break was the drop-out culture of the late 1960s. But even that burned itself out and turned into a business opportunity.
It's so incredibly pervasive, it possibly seems like the only possible world view - even though it isn't.
The drop-out culture occurred because, for the first time in history, the adult children of the middle class were able to be supported by their boomer parents, for a time.
I wonder if, and it is a long if, we are able to throw off the shackles of our financial masters, we might see a similar, only larger, cultural explosion.
Speaking for GP: The problem with the word 'culture' is that it has an evaluating component (more culture = good), which I don't think is what GP meant. Maybe a better term would be "amount of hard rules in society", i.e. how many rules do you have to follow as a member to be accepted. In those terms, from personal experience, I'm pretty sure that Japan >> Western Europe > USA - correct me if you think otherwise.
Edit: I recommend watching the making of "Aliens" [1]. Young American (J. Cameron) goes to England to direct a British film crew, experiences surprisingly big cultural clash and the whole project almost ends in chaos, even though everyone was working at a very high quality level.
Edit2: Just to preempt here, yes I know Cameron is Canadian, but he clearly comes out of American movie making culture, so I took a shortcut there.
It's not about American or European. Assuming these jerks are of higher rank, few people have the balls to stand up to their boss short of quitting. If they're lower or equal rank, then we don't have much to talk about unless the person is just a masochist that enjoys being a doormat.
In the West, we have some laws to deal with these problems.
In Japan and Korea, it wasn't that long ago that it was
totally acceptable for your boss to smack you in the face. And you have to take it because no company will hire you if you quit.
It's still pretty bad in South Korea and China, just look up Korea Airline nut rage scandal.
The strong always oppress the weak. The weak gets angry and revolt, then they become the strong and proceed to oppress those weaker than them. This is the summary of human society and history.
Don't confuse the specific action for the intent behind it. Specific actions such as putting your shoes on the table have a high degree of cultural context surrounding them. The message they send is completely dependent on the culture of the person performing them.
All of that doesn't mean there aren't equivalent forms of aggressiveness in other cultures. Look at Hitler, for example.
American here, and I can relate to your comments somewhat. Your summary captures a lot of what I dislike about the business side of business in the US.
Actually, Europeans can be jerks and aholes as much as Americans. I'm speaking from personal experience. Given half a chance, as they were on the project that I'm working on, the Europeans behaved identically, perhaps worse, to Americans. If the stakes are right (promotion and $$$) and the opportunity presents itself, just about anybody can be a jerk and get away with it. Sorry if the truth hurts.
Also not read to the end, right? The article's second half discusses how it's not about jerk or not but about showing confidence and stealing for the group. Just fighting for yourself gets you nowhere.
I think that in some vague sense, self confidence (sometimes spilling over into egotism) is a requirement in order to occupy high positions.
Before you can convince others of your skill, you have to convince yourself. And even then, you have to be willing to actually take the top spot. Plenty of people are uncomfortable with earning vast amounts of money - they might want it, but the actual process of taking surplus value from underlings is something different.
Jokes aside, exuding confidence is different from being confident and orthogonal from the truthiness of you statement/position.
Being a leader means that you can exude confidence regardless of how confident you are on the data or it's source. Why? Because, at the end of the day your team needs to trust you to make the correct decision and the first thing they will measure (knowingly or unknowingly) is whether you trust yourself.
If you keep being proven wrong your team will stop trusting you. But, that will start happening a lot sooner if you don't look like you trust yourself.
tldr: being doubtful and exuding doubt in yourself are completely different things. If you are in a leadership position doing the latter is poison to your team.
I have worked for people who were overly (sometimes unjustly) confident in themselves and also for one person who was basically a dispassionate, consensus-building Bayesian optimizer. A confident person might be able to get more people on his side initially, but he will have to consistently deliver successes after that point, and once the facade cracks more than a few times, he is screwed. This is true even if, depending on the industry or the problem space, a high expectation of consistent success is irrational on the part of the people following him.
On the other hand by making people a part of the decision-making process and laying bare the framework by which action is conceived and then taken, while it may be harder (sometimes very much harder) to get people to go along, they will also tolerate setbacks along the way much better. I think it is also probably much easier for people to act in a way that is consistent with the goals of the team, since they will know and be closer to what those goals actually are in the first place.
I guess what I'm getting at is, "confidence" I take to be a type of information-hiding activity. This can be made to work and is sometimes even the optimal choice, but it does require more social skill and risk on the part of the confident person.
Lots of things here so my response is going to be a little jumbled :)
Yeah, regression to mean definitely a thing. It can topple justifiably confident people and/or prop up frauds.
In my experience, decision by committee has never worked when times are tough. When times are tough you just need to be able to trust your leadership to know what they are doing and not micro manage them (and not have them micro-manage you).
When times aren't tough, then anything will work :)
Really, there is no such thing as full-disclosure of information or decision-making. But, you should have full-disclosure of goals so everyone is pushing in the same direction.
Your CEO will have info you don't have. Second-guessing him when times are tough will just lead to poison. And anyway, even in decision by committee you'll have people who exude confidence being able to sell their ideas better etcs. They will just do so with no accountability.
I'm not sure people tolerate setbacks any better in the long-term regardless of whether they were part of the decision or not. Humans are revisionists. I've definitely heard comments in the line of "He's the CEO, why is he asking us?" and "I said that would happen. " when things are going bad.
I think of "confidence" as complexity-hiding rather than information-hiding. Basically, it's saying "you can trust me to do my job. Worry about yours."
At the end of the day, working in any team is going to be based on how much you can trust everyone else to do their jobs. If you can't, time to move on.
Atlantic article has a bunch of unexamined underlying assumptions that are then presented as some false dichotomy, in order to inspire fear and self-loathing in the masses? Color me unsurprised.
There are times to be nice and times to be a jerk. That's it. You have to listen to your instincts, an activity assiduously avoided by the Atlantic demographic.
I've noticed that as I've spent time on both sides of being nice and being mean, it's easier to turn one or the other on or off depending on the situation. Eventually, I stopped being nice (or even mean) out of obligation. I've gotten a lot happier as a result. Yes, it's also a thing to cave into being a jerk out of social pressure.
Which is when we get to the unexamined foundation of this article: that we have to be nice or mean because it will "pay off" or help our position in society. This is just a bunch of bullshit because what matters isn't your personality, it's what you contributed to the world. If that means you need to kick some ass in order for your contribution to be seen, then that's ok. On the other hand if that means you need to be super friendly and nice, that's also ok. Skipping the pretension and being real is what matters, and in a large number of cases that pays off the best anyway!
Amen to being real. I've had a boss that is insecure, obviously wants to assert themselves and does so in non-direct ways, like through email, but can't do it in person and acts nice (falsely, as I've now come to learn). It drives me nuts.
Being direct and honest saves a lot of time. However, people come from different backgrounds and have different levels of comfort in expressing themselves, so we often have to learn to deal with such people.
I would not say it like that. Being a jerk might be seen as necessary in a environment of political correctness and kindness. Also, sometimes, decisions being taken swiftly can mean steady progress, while not being very pleasing.
There is a difference between being "real straightforward" and being a jerk that just annoy others without having any nice intent behind it.
You say you have got happier, but it might be at the expense of others, and did it improve your work or the work of others, or the work of the company ? Hard to tell.
> There are times to be nice and times to be a jerk. That's it. You have to listen to your instincts, an activity assiduously avoided by the Atlantic demographic.
To me it sounds like you are describing how a society of reasonable people should act. That we don't live in such a society is why articles like this are useful - for reasonable people to deal with these others, who have often risen to positions of power, we must first understand them.
Speaking for myself and the current environment I'm working in, I found the article very interesting and I would very much like to know more on the subject.
They aren't mutually exclusive: being nice or not is a tool in your toolbox for all interactions.
You can be nice all the time, but that doesn't mean you'll be effective all the time.
It's crazy to me that we engineers are so focused on hacking systems but seem to denigrate hacking personal interactions as if it's something dirty blah blah[0].
But I bet you wouldn't like someone who tries to suck up to you, either. So maybe the idea is to make a good impression on others, and that might need more than simply being nice, even if you don't want to be successful.
Being a jerk and having very little empathy will definitely help you becoming successful in money and glamor sense. Not sure if that will help you to become successful in your life since your jerkiness and empathy will eventually spill over to your personal life causing life to be pretty much miserable.
But you do not need to read books to learn this: actually no book will teach you this. Life will. Sadly, sometimes that it is too late.
I don't think this is true. It's narrative nice people tell themselves to find reason in a world that has none.
Yea, they suffer sometimes from poor planning and bad luck, but more often than not, they'll get away with it. And they won't feel bad about it, not even a little bit.
Just see how some people cheat on their spouse and then get a sweet settlement and fat paycheck every month by order of the court. Maybe those people are secretly miserable but I doubt it. It's actually pretty clever if you think about it and nature rewards cleverness.
I know people who tries to be stubborn to cover up their lack of knowledge.
Usually, those people are smarter than the majority but not quite smart enough to realize that they're not always right.
One thing I don't understand is why Steve Jobs took credit for some of the stuff that Jony Ive did (assumming this is true). He's already the CEO, so unless he was worried about Ive usurping his position, there was absolutely no point.
People talk behind your back and the truth will usually get out. It's just miscalculated and ego-driven with absolutely no gain, monetarily and socially.
Then we have the story of him scamming Wozniak over his fair share of the Atari bonus. Maybe Jobs thought they wouldn't have a long friendship left?
Forget nice or jerk for a moment, but would you sell your friendship with a genius for that small amount of money?
At this point in his life, Jobs was a nobody and without Wozniak, he would probably still be a nobody.
Imagine if Wozniak found out earlier. Imagine if Ive went over to a rival company.
Some of these jerks do not realize how long people hold grudges and what an angry person is capable of. A lot of it is just childish like a bully beating up some small kid for no reason.
It's not smart or assertive, just short-sighted. Look at how many revolutions were started by hunger and poverty. Millions of Irish people starved to death during the Potato Famine and evicted from their land while their landlords happily dined on lobster soup. The Irish Republican Army is still running around today.
It's people like this that breeds problem in the world.
Today most of us are not dying from hunger in the first world but just go back in time a little bit and you can watch these "jerks" dining on abalones, shark fins, caviar while riding inside their cozy palanquin.
They do leave some scrap left for the peasants though, enough to stay alive, work and pay tax. But they see it as theirs to begin with, so it's ok. All that generosity "trickling down".
"At this point in his life, Jobs was a nobody and without Wozniak, he would probably still be a nobody."
I have to disagree here. While Jobs might not have been a tech giant without Woz (then again, he might...NeXT, Pixar, new Apple all happened without Woz), I'm as certain as I can be that the man would have been famous no matter what. Possibly as a cult leader, a music promoter, or a politician, but famous somehow.
We'll never really know. I would love to watch that movie though.
Also I didn't mean to use "nobody" as an insult. There's nothing wrong with being a nobody. The majority of people who lived were nobody but without them we would have nothing today.
Have you ever sat around trying to talk to a colleague with his shoes on top of the table? It's awful behavior and I can't stand it. I usually just walk away.
I think that this is a context of which country, era and industry you are in. If you are a general in the middle ages, or a wall street stock broker in the 50s, or a gangster / mafia leader in the 30s, then being a Jerk is kind of a must have to move forward. If you are a software engineer at a SF startup, not so much. Why people try to find "global truths" when it's clear that right and wrong are very, very subjective.
Being nice in highschool only works if you are the most attractive / popular person, (so does being a jerk). If you are not so attractive / smart / good in sports, then being a Jerk or being nice won't really help you...
When you are an adult, being a jerk usually never pays, unless you are surrounded by jerks and you want to fit in.
Also there is a difference between respecting people and liking people.
> ...being a Jerk is kind of a must have to move forward. If you are a software engineer at a SF startup, not so much
At least in the companies I've worked at (outside SF), if you don't step up you will just be taken advantage of and put on the sidelines. Want to be lead on the new project coming up? Don't want your boss to expect you to work this weekend? Unless SF is full of hippies in charge, it's going to be exactly the same there.
> When you are an adult, being a jerk usually never pays, unless you are surrounded by jerks and you want to fit in.
Definitively not the experience I have at working in large companies.
It is a coincidence because I have had that very same discussion with colleagues last week and we collected the stories.
In our experience being a jerk always pays off if you have higher aspiration than staying in your team (i.e. you want to be promoted or move to a different team)
Our conclusion is that big companies don't fire somebody without bullet proof objective reasons and since most employees at all level are non confrontational, the jerk are never called on their bullshit. So you get the jerk accusing everybody of murder and nobody calling him on it, which is the end of any HR move to fire him. The other option is to move them around until they end up in the position where they are less toxic.
So we all ended up with variation of stories like "The boss told us he knew the guy was a jerk, and not to worry about his attempt to sink the team: nobody is taking him seriously" that eventually conclude with the guy moving to be somebody else problem until he eventually get what he wanted ( promotion, raise, ... )
As a guy who just recently raised hell, mostly got ignored for it, and is now moving teams, I hope what I did won't be remembered as "oh, that jerk was just trying to sink the team".
I hope in your case you at least made very sure the "jerk" wasn't right.
The article doesn't claim a "global truth", as you put it. Take the passage below, for example:
> Yet in at least three situations, a touch of jerkiness can be helpful. The first is if your job, or some element of it, involves a series of onetime encounters in which reputational blowback has minimal effect. The second is in that evanescent moment after a group has formed but its hierarchy has not. (Think the first day of summer camp.) The third—not fully explored here, but worth mentioning—is when the group’s survival is in question, speed is essential, and a paralyzing existential doubt is in the air. It was when things got truly desperate at Apple, its market share having shrunk to 4 percent, that the board invited Steve Jobs to return (Jobs then ousted most of those who had invited him back).
Am I the only one who feels very uncomfortable with the fact people these days are using "jerk" and "asshole" as an "objective" description of other people qualities? Is it a long time since this became "normal" in English? Not only it sounds vulgar and disgusting, it is very poor way to express your opinion as well. If I'm calling you "a jerk" it means nothing except the fact I don't like something about you (which maybe also not entirely true).
Things like "putting your feet on the table" and "speaking first" are concrete and measurable, "being a jerk" is not. In fact, you cannot be "a jerk" at all, you can be somebody, who was called "a jerk" by somebody else. And why am I calling you a jerk? You can never know. Maybe I consider you being a jerk, because you don't open the door for a lady. Maybe, because you do open the door and those are being "oppressive towards female equality" or some other ridiculous thing.
I agree. I found especially ridiculous the part of the article where the author tries to dissect "asshole" into "ass" and "hole" and comes up with litmus tests to differentiate the two.
To me the logical conclusion is that in a weak and vulnerable society: it pays to be a jerk. In other words, the fact that a jerk can be a good leader just speaks poorly of those following such leader. That said, I think that the article is rooted on a stereotyped false dichotomy: I have met nice people that can sometimes act as assholes, and assholes that can be empathic.
i can't wait until brain imaging technology improves and we can make sociopaths and narcissists wear a government-mandated scarlet letter letting everyone know how dangerous they are.
Was Steve Jobs really a jerk? In any case there seems to be a lot of cargo cult in this theory. Even if SJ was a jerk, it doesn't follow that by being a jerk you could be as successful as SJ, or even that SJ was successful because he was a jerk (if he was).
Spent a few minutes trying to find the one extremely rude email he once wrote to a customer, since he liked to do that from time to time and it stuck in my head.
I like the idea of stealing coffee for the group. If you just pay for coffee from your own pocket people might look down on you, because you give something that should be yours. But if you fight for a raise and use that money to invite everybody to a party then you can achieve something and that your success also means a betterment for the others.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 176 ms ] threadhttp://recruitinganimal.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8345220fb69e201b...
You don't need to be a jerk and eat the last cookie but having a strong sense of "alpha" confidence in most interview-like situation pays off really well.
Next time you have an interview (or a one-on-one or a salesy meeting), try to exude some sense of power[0] (don't overdo it!) and see how the other person reacts. I know that it blew my mind the first few times I tried it.
As an aside, it's crazy to me that we engineers are so focused on hacking systems but seem to denigrate hacking personal interactions as if it's something dirty/beneath us.
[0] http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes...
It must be nice to be able to just make up and use a method for identifying "narcissists" without having to test whether the people you're identifying as narcissists are, in fact, narcissists. In my opinion, if this is how you do research you can hardly call what you do science.
If that is your measure of narcissism, then it's fine -- but it should probably be called something else. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the first CEO in the above example was more successful than the second.
It's not mentioned in the abstract either, but I don't know whether we'd expect it to be.
When admitting mistake, use "we". Teamwork you know.
I believe that set a record for fewest minutes on screen in an Oscar-winning role. (Judi Dench as Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love.)
Still does not pay to be an asshole though. If you want to call them assholes - I believe Jobs and Patton would have been just as successful if they had not been. But their legacies are (maybe forever) tarnished because of it.
Patton could have just as easily not gotten the chance to stage his magnificent campaign across Europe - just because of an "asshole" move. It wasn't worth it. Proves that people do still care about how others are treated.
Except the research doesn't support this opinion.
"Being nice" doesn't get you anywhere, but that's not the same as being a giver.
the slapping incidents were an example to Eisenhower, Marshall, and other leaders of Patton's brashness and impulsiveness
His most successful and famous campaigns can be described as brash and impulsive!
Larry is guilty of a lot of things - but his high profile was very calculated and served business interests.
I'm getting the impression that Larry is checking out now; the engagement he had ten years ago doesn't seem to be there anymore.
So I asked why we bought it. I was told that Larry took any opportunity to buy a potential competitor. My role would be to spend perhaps a year understanding their technology deeply. Then some number of months creating an integration plan for any technology we might want to keep. Then managing an Oracle team responsible for integrating the technology into Oracle products. And finally winding down the company.
Well, I've spent my entire career creating things. And now I was being asked to destroy things. So I thought "Is this what I want to do?". So I turned down an offer that was really coming from Larry and senior management - I figured it was time to go. (This was over 10 years ago - Larry was still very involved.)
What inspired me to ask is that John Cullinane had earlier volunteered the same question to me, and given the opposite answer, which also surprised me.
This was all in the late 1980s. And it was a staple of my conversations with Larry that he blast other people, commonly in quite humorous terms.
Larry's also the person who first told me of the bit about almost everybody thinking they were above average ...
Of course there is still the slight problem of determining whatever correlates you have found actually correlate with an abstract state like narcissism.
This is rampant in socio/psycho academia and professionals. Not saying ALL of them are like this but in general, it is not a quantitative or strictly scientific field. Lot of the work done in this industry is self-fulfilling prophecies and their time is mostly spent on fabricating/bending truths and hard facts and say "here's a statistically significant outcome therefore assholes are great leaders".
It's laughable and I've stopped reading the article because I felt like it's built on the same shoddy science work and poor understanding of statistics and it's significance.
The problem with words is that people think they have a specific meaning. He created one for his study -- narcissism is defined as some weighted combination of those metrics.
Consider two independent fair die rolls, with A and C being the outcomes. Let B be the sum of the outcomes. The higher A is, the higher B is likely to be, so A and B are positively correlated. So are B and C. However there is no correlation between A and C as they are independent.
Yeah, that was his point. Hope doesn't cut it. You kind of have to go off and prove your formula does correlate highly with true narcissism, not just skip on to the next step.
What is wrong with making up and using a narcissism metric and seeing what it correlates with? It's how social science is done, and how you discover results that are worth exploring. Get off your high horse.
> It's how social science is done, and how you discover results that are worth exploring.
Do you see the problem here? If you invent metrics, assume they work, then only pursue the ones that produce results "worth exploring"... can you see the problem?
Keep in mind that even the GP's original quote included at least two references to the difficulty in measuring the trait ('tricky' and 'had to use indirect measures'). It's not like the researcher boldly strode forth and said "This is the way, have faith!". The results are also suitably couched. It seems like this "bad science!" thread is making a mountain out of a molehill.
So are you telling me that the very best way we have of establishing narcissism is the "the frequency with which the CEO’s name appeared in company press releases"??
If not, then a scientist is required to either:
a) Use the best method.
or...
b) Develop a proxy and calibrate it against the best method.
You can't just postulate a proxy for narcissism out of thin fucking air and then use it.
It scares me that I have to explain this.
Your method much less robust than the method in the article, and it might not even get past an ethics committee, for that matter - formally questioning people about whether their boss was up themselves? Think about how could that possibly backfire and significantly harm the subjects. Where would you question them - at the workplace as a job lot? Or would you track them individually outside of work, where these kinds of questions about the boss could now be seen as an organised attempt at harrassment, given the effort required?
This was an exploratory study trying something out, with explicit mention that the measures were indirect. It's not like there's an international treaty being based on it. Calm the fuck down.
To pick at one example, do you think it is easy to get time to just sit down and talk with a CEO or their employees? Particularly when the subject of your research is how narcissistic the CEO might be?
People who are nice, team players, selfless, etc. cluster near the top and the bottom of our hypothetical payscale graph.
People who are narcissistic, egotistical, entitled, and overall "assholes" also cluster near the top and the bottom of payscale graph.
But their data on narcissists only comes from CEOs?
I would suggest that in aggregate this tells us basically nothing about how one should act to get ahead (Except maybe "Avoid the middle road of only being an asshole sometimes?").
It does however suggest that narcissism might be more common among CEOs than in the general populace, although again, not a predictor of being a particularly successful one.
This is all of course setting aside the obvious problems of "How are they even defining these nebulous categories (In the case of narcissism, their measures were pretty unconvincing IMO. A lot of those decisions could have been made by marketing/PR people. There's sometimes value in the 'personal brand' of your CEO, even if they themselves are pretty humble in attitude) and even if we believe their definitions, how could they possibly be measuring them in a rigorous way in the wild"
The difference is a cultural one. Americans don't complain when they see or experience injustice or poor behavior. Nobody will talk to a jerk like this in Europe.Or actually he will hear something. Like: "Can you take your shoes from the table Mr. Important? You are not at home! BTW, Jane did this work, not you, why are you claiming credit for her work?" I can't imagine someone telling something like this to a jerk in the US. At the same time I can't imagine someone not telling something like this to a jerk in Europe.
Also, never have seen so much politics and self-praise as in the US.
But then again, maybe a strict culture that puts everyone in their respective place, is the reason why we don't get Steve Jobs or Bill Gates success stories.
My guess is most people would agree that if you put your feet on the table and take credit where it isn't due then you're probably an ahole. But this is a stereotype of the typical 'jerk'.
It's the jerks that 'play the game' and aren't necessarily blatant that do (perhaps unfairly) well.
Almost universally, Europeans take their shoes off when entering a home. As a guest, it is expected, and failing to do so unless specifically instructed not to is rude. A majority of Americans I know do not take their shoes off at home and guests are not expected to unless specifically asked or given some cue.
Feet on a desk in an office would be considered rude in both Europe and the US, however, I have a suspicion it's considerably more rude in Europe.
Utter bullshit.
I'm sorry, but I have no more subtle response to such clueless arrogant pontificating prefaced with the typical "as an American who has spend a good amount of time in Europe".
If you had bothered to even superficially explore a single small country on the continent, you wouldn't have such a naive uninformed notion of European cultural diversity.
For you information: any such very, very, specific cultural habit, from taking of your shoes to how you have dinner, is almost certainly nowhere near "universally" true within any given European country (which historically tend to contain multiple cultures), let alone the entire continent.
So, what is the example of an European country where it is not true.
BTW, UK doesn't count.
That being said, I second the content, Europe is way too heterogeneous an entity to draw any continent-wide cultural conclusion.
We mix Southern Spaniards, Sicilians, Ukrainians and Bulgarians with people from the Faroe Islands, Austrians and Scots, this is a wide gamut bunch.
Try putting your shoes on the table in Europe at the same time claiming credit for someone's else work in Paris or Berlin.
Taking credit is a dick move anywhere, and if you get called on it, no one will respect you. The credit-takers who get away with it are the ones who do it in a way hat they won't get called out.
Feet on the desk or table would definitely make a person disliked in most companies. Again, Silicon Valley is an outlier, and the obnoxious Wall Street culture is pretty much extinct because most of the "alpha trader" jobs have been automated.
Also, never have seen so much politics and self-praise as in the US.
There is more tolerance (if not requirement, to some degree) for self-promotion in the US, and that's especially true of Silicon Valley. It's fairly regional, to tell the truth. The sort of person who gets funded in the Valley would be considered an overconfident tool in New York and be actively disliked in Chicago (as in, presumably, most of Europe).
That said, I know some people who've worked at Rocket Internet companies and the Samwers seem to take the stereotypically American boorishness to a whole new level.
The results are that it will be easier to do thing like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, but at the same time easier to miss the mark even more and shoot up schools (Not saying that is an exclusively American phenomenon though).
I personally think the tradeoff is worth it. It's like being given a piano versus a "make music automatically!" iPad app. I will take the piano despite the much greater possibility of making mistakes, for the chance to make something that sounds much better.
Although this weak culture leads to some other problems, like the not complaining when they see injustice. It's that it is more difficult to develop your instincts for dealing with injustive when you don't know the expectations and rituals of the group(s) in which you are participating.
IMHO, this is mostly a presentation of non-conformity. In my experience, having lived half my life in the US and half of it elsewhere, non-conformity is punished much more severely here than in western europe. You even get ostracized here for having a different concept of what non-conformity involves.
If you look at the US media, there's almost no coverage at all of other ethical systems and other forms of individuality.
The closest thing to a break was the drop-out culture of the late 1960s. But even that burned itself out and turned into a business opportunity.
It's so incredibly pervasive, it possibly seems like the only possible world view - even though it isn't.
I wonder if, and it is a long if, we are able to throw off the shackles of our financial masters, we might see a similar, only larger, cultural explosion.
Edit: I recommend watching the making of "Aliens" [1]. Young American (J. Cameron) goes to England to direct a British film crew, experiences surprisingly big cultural clash and the whole project almost ends in chaos, even though everyone was working at a very high quality level.
Edit2: Just to preempt here, yes I know Cameron is Canadian, but he clearly comes out of American movie making culture, so I took a shortcut there.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V--gH9ayR-o
In the West, we have some laws to deal with these problems.
In Japan and Korea, it wasn't that long ago that it was totally acceptable for your boss to smack you in the face. And you have to take it because no company will hire you if you quit.
It's still pretty bad in South Korea and China, just look up Korea Airline nut rage scandal.
The strong always oppress the weak. The weak gets angry and revolt, then they become the strong and proceed to oppress those weaker than them. This is the summary of human society and history.
Don't confuse the specific action for the intent behind it. Specific actions such as putting your shoes on the table have a high degree of cultural context surrounding them. The message they send is completely dependent on the culture of the person performing them.
All of that doesn't mean there aren't equivalent forms of aggressiveness in other cultures. Look at Hitler, for example.
Before you can convince others of your skill, you have to convince yourself. And even then, you have to be willing to actually take the top spot. Plenty of people are uncomfortable with earning vast amounts of money - they might want it, but the actual process of taking surplus value from underlings is something different.
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. -- Bertrand Russell
Jokes aside, exuding confidence is different from being confident and orthogonal from the truthiness of you statement/position.
Being a leader means that you can exude confidence regardless of how confident you are on the data or it's source. Why? Because, at the end of the day your team needs to trust you to make the correct decision and the first thing they will measure (knowingly or unknowingly) is whether you trust yourself.
If you keep being proven wrong your team will stop trusting you. But, that will start happening a lot sooner if you don't look like you trust yourself.
tldr: being doubtful and exuding doubt in yourself are completely different things. If you are in a leadership position doing the latter is poison to your team.
On the other hand by making people a part of the decision-making process and laying bare the framework by which action is conceived and then taken, while it may be harder (sometimes very much harder) to get people to go along, they will also tolerate setbacks along the way much better. I think it is also probably much easier for people to act in a way that is consistent with the goals of the team, since they will know and be closer to what those goals actually are in the first place.
I guess what I'm getting at is, "confidence" I take to be a type of information-hiding activity. This can be made to work and is sometimes even the optimal choice, but it does require more social skill and risk on the part of the confident person.
Yeah, regression to mean definitely a thing. It can topple justifiably confident people and/or prop up frauds.
In my experience, decision by committee has never worked when times are tough. When times are tough you just need to be able to trust your leadership to know what they are doing and not micro manage them (and not have them micro-manage you).
When times aren't tough, then anything will work :)
Really, there is no such thing as full-disclosure of information or decision-making. But, you should have full-disclosure of goals so everyone is pushing in the same direction.
Your CEO will have info you don't have. Second-guessing him when times are tough will just lead to poison. And anyway, even in decision by committee you'll have people who exude confidence being able to sell their ideas better etcs. They will just do so with no accountability.
I'm not sure people tolerate setbacks any better in the long-term regardless of whether they were part of the decision or not. Humans are revisionists. I've definitely heard comments in the line of "He's the CEO, why is he asking us?" and "I said that would happen. " when things are going bad.
I think of "confidence" as complexity-hiding rather than information-hiding. Basically, it's saying "you can trust me to do my job. Worry about yours."
At the end of the day, working in any team is going to be based on how much you can trust everyone else to do their jobs. If you can't, time to move on.
There are times to be nice and times to be a jerk. That's it. You have to listen to your instincts, an activity assiduously avoided by the Atlantic demographic.
I've noticed that as I've spent time on both sides of being nice and being mean, it's easier to turn one or the other on or off depending on the situation. Eventually, I stopped being nice (or even mean) out of obligation. I've gotten a lot happier as a result. Yes, it's also a thing to cave into being a jerk out of social pressure.
Which is when we get to the unexamined foundation of this article: that we have to be nice or mean because it will "pay off" or help our position in society. This is just a bunch of bullshit because what matters isn't your personality, it's what you contributed to the world. If that means you need to kick some ass in order for your contribution to be seen, then that's ok. On the other hand if that means you need to be super friendly and nice, that's also ok. Skipping the pretension and being real is what matters, and in a large number of cases that pays off the best anyway!
Being direct and honest saves a lot of time. However, people come from different backgrounds and have different levels of comfort in expressing themselves, so we often have to learn to deal with such people.
There is a difference between being "real straightforward" and being a jerk that just annoy others without having any nice intent behind it.
You say you have got happier, but it might be at the expense of others, and did it improve your work or the work of others, or the work of the company ? Hard to tell.
To me it sounds like you are describing how a society of reasonable people should act. That we don't live in such a society is why articles like this are useful - for reasonable people to deal with these others, who have often risen to positions of power, we must first understand them.
Speaking for myself and the current environment I'm working in, I found the article very interesting and I would very much like to know more on the subject.
I reckon that it's more than 'being an asshole' It's about being yourself. If you are an asshole then be one. If you're a nice guy, be one.
You can be nice all the time, but that doesn't mean you'll be effective all the time.
It's crazy to me that we engineers are so focused on hacking systems but seem to denigrate hacking personal interactions as if it's something dirty blah blah[0].
[0] copied from my other comment.
I think that's the whole point too, there's a lot of details but in the end - if you're nicer than the other guy, he'll exploit that.
In yet another set of words - which while funny is actually exactly the same concept:
batman: i'll always beat superman, he has a strong weakness.
people: kryptonite?
batman: no, he's a nice guy, i'm not.
But you do not need to read books to learn this: actually no book will teach you this. Life will. Sadly, sometimes that it is too late.
Yea, they suffer sometimes from poor planning and bad luck, but more often than not, they'll get away with it. And they won't feel bad about it, not even a little bit.
Just see how some people cheat on their spouse and then get a sweet settlement and fat paycheck every month by order of the court. Maybe those people are secretly miserable but I doubt it. It's actually pretty clever if you think about it and nature rewards cleverness.
http://www.amazon.com/What-Would-Machiavelli-Justify-Meannes...
I know people who tries to be stubborn to cover up their lack of knowledge.
Usually, those people are smarter than the majority but not quite smart enough to realize that they're not always right.
One thing I don't understand is why Steve Jobs took credit for some of the stuff that Jony Ive did (assumming this is true). He's already the CEO, so unless he was worried about Ive usurping his position, there was absolutely no point.
People talk behind your back and the truth will usually get out. It's just miscalculated and ego-driven with absolutely no gain, monetarily and socially.
Then we have the story of him scamming Wozniak over his fair share of the Atari bonus. Maybe Jobs thought they wouldn't have a long friendship left?
Forget nice or jerk for a moment, but would you sell your friendship with a genius for that small amount of money?
At this point in his life, Jobs was a nobody and without Wozniak, he would probably still be a nobody.
Imagine if Wozniak found out earlier. Imagine if Ive went over to a rival company.
Some of these jerks do not realize how long people hold grudges and what an angry person is capable of. A lot of it is just childish like a bully beating up some small kid for no reason.
It's not smart or assertive, just short-sighted. Look at how many revolutions were started by hunger and poverty. Millions of Irish people starved to death during the Potato Famine and evicted from their land while their landlords happily dined on lobster soup. The Irish Republican Army is still running around today.
It's people like this that breeds problem in the world. Today most of us are not dying from hunger in the first world but just go back in time a little bit and you can watch these "jerks" dining on abalones, shark fins, caviar while riding inside their cozy palanquin.
They do leave some scrap left for the peasants though, enough to stay alive, work and pay tax. But they see it as theirs to begin with, so it's ok. All that generosity "trickling down".
Being a jerk pays, until it doesn't.
I have to disagree here. While Jobs might not have been a tech giant without Woz (then again, he might...NeXT, Pixar, new Apple all happened without Woz), I'm as certain as I can be that the man would have been famous no matter what. Possibly as a cult leader, a music promoter, or a politician, but famous somehow.
Also I didn't mean to use "nobody" as an insult. There's nothing wrong with being a nobody. The majority of people who lived were nobody but without them we would have nothing today.
Yes, but they probably wouldn't have happened if it weren't for "old Apple". Thus Woz still gets some credit for Jobs' success in other fields.
Being nice in highschool only works if you are the most attractive / popular person, (so does being a jerk). If you are not so attractive / smart / good in sports, then being a Jerk or being nice won't really help you... When you are an adult, being a jerk usually never pays, unless you are surrounded by jerks and you want to fit in.
Also there is a difference between respecting people and liking people.
At least in the companies I've worked at (outside SF), if you don't step up you will just be taken advantage of and put on the sidelines. Want to be lead on the new project coming up? Don't want your boss to expect you to work this weekend? Unless SF is full of hippies in charge, it's going to be exactly the same there.
Definitively not the experience I have at working in large companies.
It is a coincidence because I have had that very same discussion with colleagues last week and we collected the stories.
In our experience being a jerk always pays off if you have higher aspiration than staying in your team (i.e. you want to be promoted or move to a different team)
Our conclusion is that big companies don't fire somebody without bullet proof objective reasons and since most employees at all level are non confrontational, the jerk are never called on their bullshit. So you get the jerk accusing everybody of murder and nobody calling him on it, which is the end of any HR move to fire him. The other option is to move them around until they end up in the position where they are less toxic.
So we all ended up with variation of stories like "The boss told us he knew the guy was a jerk, and not to worry about his attempt to sink the team: nobody is taking him seriously" that eventually conclude with the guy moving to be somebody else problem until he eventually get what he wanted ( promotion, raise, ... )
I hope in your case you at least made very sure the "jerk" wasn't right.
The article doesn't claim a "global truth", as you put it. Take the passage below, for example:
> Yet in at least three situations, a touch of jerkiness can be helpful. The first is if your job, or some element of it, involves a series of onetime encounters in which reputational blowback has minimal effect. The second is in that evanescent moment after a group has formed but its hierarchy has not. (Think the first day of summer camp.) The third—not fully explored here, but worth mentioning—is when the group’s survival is in question, speed is essential, and a paralyzing existential doubt is in the air. It was when things got truly desperate at Apple, its market share having shrunk to 4 percent, that the board invited Steve Jobs to return (Jobs then ousted most of those who had invited him back).
Some jobs require bad people.
Things like "putting your feet on the table" and "speaking first" are concrete and measurable, "being a jerk" is not. In fact, you cannot be "a jerk" at all, you can be somebody, who was called "a jerk" by somebody else. And why am I calling you a jerk? You can never know. Maybe I consider you being a jerk, because you don't open the door for a lady. Maybe, because you do open the door and those are being "oppressive towards female equality" or some other ridiculous thing.
Instead, found this, which gives sufficient documentation that, yeah, he probably was: http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10