No Brilliant Jerks
leadershipnow.com
leadershipnow.com
If I were an employer I wouldn't want an employee with his level of toxicity laying waste to morale. But it could be exactly that kind of employee who could make the company profitable with the power of one brain.
So I'd go with a default policy of no brilliant jerks, but be willing to override it for some values of brilliant and jerk.
Can you give examples?
In the case of Jobs and Gates, they were both in charge of many people and hence many people's paycheques depended on their whims.
Taleb's twitter rants are, by comparison, a lone voice pounding sand in the middle of nowhere.
I could be wrong, it could be that Taleb is in charge of some hedge fund and he fires people for whatever reasons.
Reality is complicated. You don't get at the truth by finding the absolutist statement that is correct most of the time. You have to conduct a more holistic analysis than that. What causes this person to be a jerk? Has the very behavior that caused them to be a jerk also led to the founding of this company? Would they lose their passion if we tried to cage them like a pet bird? If so, how critical is their passion to this company? What if they're absolutely, 100% right about something and they're being a "jerk" because they are trying to communicate precisely how much they think they're right and how wrong everyone else is? How right have they been in the past?
On top of asking the right questions, you need to do a first principles analysis. What drives this company to be profitable in a competitive context? Why do we want to reduce tension in this company? Is it because that tension is bad for profit? Are you sure?
[1]: I removed the following from the top of my comment: "There are "No" brilliant jerks? Absolutely none? What evidence is that based on?" because a below commenter is right that it doesn't really fit the primary meaning of the headline. My core point remains pretty much the same though.
Do we really want more companies like Apple? They’re the Monsanto of tech IMO.
"No" here is used in the sense of "no pets", "no solicitors", "no outside food or drink beyond this point"
??¹
> A simple chain of logic, extrapolating from that headline, would lead to "if they truly were all around brilliant, they wouldn't act that way.
???²
¹ Valuing non-jerkiness more isn’t “negating brilliance”. Brilliant non-jerks are available.
² Er, no.
Also, with regards to this comment: "Valuing non-jerkiness more isn’t “negating brilliance”. Brilliant non-jerks are available."
Sure, there's no shortage of brilliant non-jerks, but sometimes the most brilliant person for a given company in a given context (by an order of magnitude) is a jerk. You have to apply first principles, systems thinking to determine whether they're right for the company or not, and whether mitigating their jerky behavior is bad for the company or not. I don't totally disagree with the article. Sometimes the measures they recommend are well-advised, and sometimes they would be misguided. I'm cautioning about the latter because it's such a common human instinct to try to cast out or sheer the black sheep. On the margins, group harmony is overrated.
This isn't how logic works... It's a statement, saying "No Brilliant Jerks Welcome Here". It does not negate their existence, only their company.
I'm not even sure that's a joke anymore.
There are times when you have no choice but to be disruptive. The trick, as I see it, is to only be as disruptive that you need Be and no more. And when you are disruptive, be prepared for breakage that needs to be repaired, and be ready to communicate - extensively.
Also: you had better not be wrong in your disruption.
This. Measure 10x and cut once, because if your cut is wrong you've inconvenienced a lot more people than yourself.
I feel Jerks tend to be people with little empathy for peoples feelings and high affinity for reality and the truth at the expense of everyones emotions.
While most people don't officially define a "Jerk" with the definition above, I feel that the personalities most people perceive as Jerks fit the definition above perfectly.
It's just people are unable to see past the "lack of empathy." They are unable to see that the while some actions lack empathy, they are also in line with truth and reality.
That is the ultimate question... What kind of company do you want to build or work for. Do you want a company full of yes men and people who respect others? Do you want a company where people lack respect and lay the god awful truth on the table? Or do you want something in between?
I feel to get something in between you need a few Jerks within the organization.
For jerks, it's not "anything to make this happen." It's "anything to make me happen."
When everyone is blockading everyone else, and becomes comfortable in that artificial ground-state, it takes some energy input to push things over into an actual better state. It won't happen on its own. People need to take ownership of decisions in order to make real change, but in a comfortable mutual blockade everyone seeks to avoid ownership so they don't get left holding the bag, so to speak.
The difference between someone who is an effective maverick (even on a small scale where the term would be a joke) and someone who is just a jerk comes down to attitude and approach. There's always a positive, inclusive, hey-at-least-I-offered sort of approach, and a negative, exclusive, my-way-or-the-highway approach.
I worked in academic IT for a while ages ago and the mutual blockade was the standard approach. Nothing got done, nothing got better, and it was always someone else's fault. Get individuals one-on-one and you'd always get a very rational sounding explanation of the situation and how they're hamstrung, get people together and you'd always get denial, and truly nobody wanted to unravel the Gordian knot, because it was a comfortable and familiar evil.
I happened to find myself lead on a project with a lot of autonomy, and also seconded to another project where I was a mere serf at the same time.
On the former, which was to roll out commodity desktop management stuff to a very fractured base of IT (each faculty had its own staff and a fair bit of infra, tiny little datacenters, etc), I took a very open-source, 'bazaar' style approach; produced a free, federated, sane-defaults, customizable system that was not overly prescriptive, and introduced it to those faculties one by one until 90% of the university was happily running it and working together better than before. This did require that I run afoul of people who were comfortable with the status quo, at least until I could eventually bring them around; but because I maintained a default open position the entire time, essentially being very modest and classy about the fact that my system was going to take over everything else, I won people over. A lot of the time, they're really just casting about looking for leadership, which is better defined as 'an individual willing to take risks and own consequences'.
On the latter, which was an ITIL project, the project manager had the exact opposite approach. Big expensive proprietary system, nothing federated or optional, his way or get lost. He made enemies at every turn, because instead of bringing them clarity and capability, he instead tried to use power and control to make people do what he wanted, without any real concession to it providing commensurate value for them. He ruled his own team like a tyrant, shutting down any ideas I had, expecting me to work against a requirements doc and not question anything.
Only through my own skunkworks approach and through using political capital I had accumulated on the other project was able to bring anyone onboard in anything more than a mandated sense; but the project ultimately failed because people did not want to let a jerk win, and in the case of academia where they're hard to fire, they felt comfortable resisting.
The moral here is that there's definitely a role for someone pushing large effective change, change that people may resist - in fact, it's critical - but you have to do it in a way that offers a continual and permanent olive branch to everyone, always giving them a chance to join in, never rubbing their face in anything, never holding vendettas or grudges. This is a hard thing for many humans to accomplish.
There are jerks everywhere, and there always will be. Like diseases, tornadoes and mosquitoes, they are part of life.
I think our energy is better spent creating an env that empowers nice people and encourage them to defend themselves. An env that calls out bad behavior.
It's way more durable.
If a junior person on a team is a jerk, he'll be called out quickly vs a boss who is a jerk. Like everything in life, one can get away with a lot of bad behavior if they are high up in the food chain.
He was aggressive towards his competitors, certainly, perhaps too much. His decisions around the web were perhaps "jerk-like".
But normally this word means he was nasty to other people he worked with. There are mixed stories about that. A lot of them boil down to him being a boss who simply expected good results and made his expectations clear.
If you look at CEOs of successful companies there are always lots of people ready to describe them as jerks. Mostly when asked to back that up, you get stories where they were just firm with people about what level of performance was required - the sort of thing any CEO needs to do.
Humans are weird.
Most people are fine with jerks. Just like most people aren’t jerks. It’s when the minority group “jerks” intersects with minority group “wimps” that problems show up.
And I would say both groups are equally toxic to company culture.
If this was the case, would they really be jerks?
I’ve worked with plenty of jerks and it doesn’t really bother me. I, like most well adjusted people, say “that person is just a jerk, whatever” and move on with my day.
Wimps grind the entire company to a halt because we all need to focus on their wellbeing 24/7 because they can’t do that.
It’s not to say wimps are bad. It’s just that wimps can kill a company culture just like jerks do. And more often than not, it’s the combination of the two that really causes most of the trouble.
Nothing is more damaging to a company than an over performing jerk and an underperforming wimp on the same team.
If there was an accurate adjective for Steve Jobs, even those who adored him would acknowledge that "jerk" is too kind of a descriptor. But he held onto more goodwill than this article's sacrificial lambs of Musk, Kalanick, Neumann, and Winterkorn.
This "no brilliant jerks" reminds me a bit of the anti-bully sentiment. Real bullies are popular, socially calibrated and powerful. The condemnation of "bullies" is for leaping hate on social failures with the temerity to lash out at their betters.
Whether you like it or not. If we look past 21st century culture and look back upon history...
- Caesar (killed/enslaved 1 million+ gauls)
- Augustus (killed anyone who posed a political threat, killed a lot in general)
- Genghis Khan (killed... well, he killed a lot)
- Napoleon (got hundreds of thousands of people from every European nation killed)
- The list goes on.
Name one famous historical figure who had power of some sort who didn't do anything "jerk-like".
The problem with the "jerk" definition is that the author nor most people have ever been in a position of great power. He does not understand how difficult and stressful it is to be the CEO of a big company or a top political leader.
I believe that in a position of great power, the power holder is forced to do some "jerk-like" things. You gotta make harsh decisions.
E.g. if Augustus didn't kill off all his political opponents (including Caesar's supposed only biological son), it is likely Rome will be thrown into more civil war.
Every guy has a "jerk" inside of them, and when put into a stressful situation, they are capable of using it.
One of your examples is Hitler for God's sake. Everybody else eventually bundled to fight him, including second biggest murderer of the time. And no, Hitler did not done what he done because he had no other choice as a powerful man. Seriously.
You literally collected the biggest psychopaths and claim "this is how leaders must be". Nope, we as a whole do very well when people like these are under control and don't get power.
We really really don't need Hitlers and Napoleons.
That’s a straw man. Everyone is a jerk sometimes.
There have been great people who changed the world without a predominantly jerky reputation. I don’t find much evidence Einstein was considered one, for example.
His letter to Marie Curie is a good read. https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/04/19/einstein-curie-lett...
> Name one famous historical figure who had power of some sort who didn't do anything "jerk-like".
Since the list are of kings, I namedrop Marcus Aurelius.
Add power and stress to unchecked emotional and psychological deficiencies of the susceptible person of power strong enough to derail their sense of ethics and morality and one comes face to face with a war criminal, a psychopath dictator, or a jerky maverick CEO.
Increase or decrease elements to get Caligula or Steve Jobs.
It's not about trust. It's about politics. They may not actually trust the CEO but to keep their position and good standing they have to pretend to trust the CEO.
It’s one thing to write this, but quite another to actually rein in a CEO with a ton of clout and success at their back (Adam Neumann 2020 is not the same as Adam Neumann 2018). Hand waving “oh well you have to curate the culture” isn’t enough.
I've seen this more and more recently. Is that a new approach to shadow banning? Is that automatically applied when multiple comments are flagged by some amount of people? Are the affected users aware, or is that hidden from them while they're logged in?
That's not new, and most of those people have been told that they were banned.
People can vouch for individual comments (click the timestamp, click the vouch link) to undead them. If you think a person is being unfairly moderated I guess you can email the mods to let them know.
dang has spoken about shaddowbanning here (and lots of other posts too) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23253674
Either the existence of a Jerk helps the Jerk himself survive and propagate his genes or the existence of a Jerk within a group helps groups that contain jerks survive.
If you think about it at a very surface level. Everyone hates Jerks so why does a Jerk even exist at all? Everything a Jerk does will lower his individual chances of survival by making people hate them. Humans are social creatures and an anti-social person likely will not survive if the group hates them.
Group dynamics of humans will ultimately select out Jerks. That is unless the Jerk has something to offer beyond making everyone hate them.
Obviously Jerks exist in our world, so their continued existence must offer something beneficial to the group. What would that be?
So imagine this situation. There's a software engineer at a company who's well liked. He's super nice, friendly, good-looking BUT he's ultimately not a very good software engineer. His skills are well below average, his boss knows it, everyone who's worked with him knows it, the only people who don't seem to know it is he himself and people who haven't directly worked with him. His skills are so poor that he would be fired if he wasn't so well liked.
Therein lies the problem. His Boss likes him but is unable to be honest with him about how his skills are so horrible that he'll be fired if everyone knows about how shitty his skills are. The person is so nice and well liked that not only is his career getting protected but his feelings are being protected as well because nobody wants to be a Jerk and hurt those feelings by telling him the reality.
Then a real Jerk of a person is suddenly assigned to work with this nice guy. The Jerk immediately sees the problem and reveals the truth to everyone. The Jerk regularly says things along the lines of: "This guy is useless, he doesn't know shit, the guy can't even code properly. His code is complete garbage." The Jerk publicly says these things and reveals to everyone the reality of the situation.
These are very toxic words that introduce aggression into the workplace.
But the Jerk introduces truth into the workplace. The Jerk was the only person who tells things like it is at face value. If the Jerk wasn't there, the well liked person would continue to be in that role and function as a parasite with the person himself and most of the company oblivious to the reality of the situation.
The cost of empathy is a mask placed over reality.
If your organization doesn't have Jerks then I almost guarantee that there is very likely to be huge issues within the organization that are masked by etiquette. The Jerk is essentially telling the truth and revealing big issues at great cost to himself. It's almost a form of self sacrifice.
In my my mind the Jerk exists because he benefits the group, but his actions come at great cost to his individual survival because Jerks aren't well liked.
Additionally I would argue that the term "Jerk" is a misnomer. Someone who is explicit about the truth should not be called a Jerk, especially when the truth comes at such a high cost.
The real Jerk is someone who deliberately covers up the truth. A manipulative person is never called a Jerk. A company without a single Jerk, a company where people have nearly perfect etiquette and friendly communication is also a company with a high number of manipulative people and likely deep problems that aren't discussed.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather deal with an oblivious Jerk than a well liked manipulator.
Good chunk of it is probably due to our societies getting physically older. But how much can be attributed to the culture of being nice, getting along, not rocking the boat, undermining people, etc?
OP ironically even advises to be contrarian to the contrarians. Pretty ingenious rhetoric.
Generally they were not terrible places to work - unlike the kind of startup that's a playground for dark triad people with emotional handicaps.
The latter are destructive. A small minority get shit done, but only some proportion of the shit that gets done turns out to be truly beneficial. The rest is just a toxic mess of bullshit, lies, self-aggrandising posturing, manipulation, and empathy-free exploitation, sometimes with a side order of overt fraud and criminality.
And there's been a lot more of that in recent decades than in the real-adults-but-at-play innovation powerhouses of the 50s, 60s and 70s.
Being "nice" and being a good person are two different things.
I have a loose hypothesis of my own.
Most of us are wired for a vastly slower and quieter pace of life with very little change and very few large opportunities. Think hunter gatherers or simple agriculture, the environment and evolutionary pressures at play for 99.99% of our history.
Now we have a very different environment: fast, lots of change, and lots of opportunities for huge gains everywhere.
By the standards of this environment we basically all suffer from low grade depression and anhedonia. We are literally wired to watch the corn grow.
But there are freaks. There are manics, bipolar people, high functioning psychopaths, people who are wired for fast opportunity grabbing and risk taking. Unfortunately these freaks being outliers are also often burdened by mental illness that comes with the package they got, and the odd way they are treated by society (as either gods or devils but never just peers) distorts their personality formation.
They are wired in some ways for this environment, but they are socially deeply maladjusted. Jerks.
We sort of use these people in an odd way. We make them leaders and via the mirror neuron effect borrow some of their drive. Then when their jerkish behavior gets too severe or things are not going well, we sacrifice the king.
This seems to be how regular people are able to adapt to the present fast forwarded hypermodern environment.
The other way is drugs. There are drugs like amphetamine that seem to allow regular humans to retune their brains for the current environment without borrowing motivation from a jerk. Unfortunately these come with major side effects and due to habituation the effects are not sustainable and stop working after a while.
I strongly disagree with this premise. We've seen a huge amount of refinement and polish in existing areas. You can't call that stagnation. It is less visible, but still a huge amount of value created.
> "But how much can be attributed to the culture of being nice, getting along, not rocking the boat, undermining people, etc?"
How many jerks are hailed as geniuses because they are good at presenting the work of others well? How many because they outright stole other people's work?