Crazy at the wheel: psychopathic CEOs are rife in Silicon Valley
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The entire field makes economics look rigorous.
So if you skip the article's agenda, and explore the idea, it's kind of interesting. Psycopathic traits are "persistent antisocial behavior, impaired empathy and remorse, and bold, disinhibited, egotistical traits." (thanks wikipedia)
It isn't surprising at all that successful CEOs exhibit some of those traits more than most people. I'm not sure you could fire people without "impaired empathy and remorse", even if those feelings are temporary. Firing people is terrible, and if _I_ felt the full weight of that horribleness while it was happening I'd never be able to do it.
And yeah, "bold, disinhibited, egotistical" traits are almost required to run a company at all.
What's more interesting than recognizing these, though, is the difference in how they're applied. Execs who are decent people and execs who aren't apply them differently (and decent people who aren't capable of being CEOs might not apply them at all).
I've spent a lot of time worried about my own traits. Am I decent person if I can fire people? Am I a decent person if I can't work for someone else? Am I a decent person if I'm so worried about my own work-happiness that I risk my family's well being by quitting objectively good jobs? Hopefully!
I have and I'm no sociopath. I think its easy to justify firings if you have a mature and adult attitude towards work. People perform a fireable offense and they're out the door. If you're experienced and honest with what it takes to run a business, this stuff isn't that horrible to deal with. I make tough decisions everyday. Heck, disciplining my kid is a lot tougher emotionally and no one expects you to be some super tough person to do it, every parent has to be able to pull it off.
>And yeah, "bold, disinhibited, egotistical" traits are almost required to run a company at all.
Those are meaningless psych buzzwords. I want to run my own company and I'm driven by certain ideas, goals, and ideals. I'm fairly low ego and not horribly bold, like most introverted techies. The idea of holding up guys like Steve Jobs or Larry Ellison as perfect CEOs because they act like sociopaths is fairly ridiculous. You don't need to be a huge asshole to get ahead or to be successful. I think the idea that we should praise sociopathy as leadership skills is a fairly toxic attitude that reflects an internalized anti-worker bias.
That's best case firing. Firing for performance is much harder, in my experience. Justification for that is never 100% for me, because performance failures are almost always my failure somewhere along the way (because I hired badly, or set bad expectations, or didn't help someone enough).
Plus, even for the employee being let go, it's usually better for that to happen sooner rather than later so they can more quickly move on.
Not firing someone who isn't a good fit is just avoiding your own discomfort (letting the person go) while forcing other people to suffer. It's actually the less empathetic, more psychopathic thing to do.
I find it impossible to believe that this has any degree of accuracy.
The ceos I knew were highly smart and extremely driven
Most sociopaths aren't that calculating. They don't sit there and think "How will I inflict structural damage to society tonight?". Sociopaths just want to get their rocks off (not necessarily in a sexual way), and they don't care who they have to hurt to do so. Your average sociopath is more impulsive than anything else.
As for civil servants - what evidence can offer to support the suggestion that civil servants (and I presume you mean public employees of all kinds, including those in agencies like NASA and NOAA) are more likely to be sociopaths than ordinary people?