Psychopathic tendencies help some people succeed in business
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
The big one I've observed is people who shoot upward in an organization by being obsequious to those above them and brutal to those below.
If the manager starts missing metrics, manager start firing employees to cover up for these misses and maybe moves to a different region because they have laid as much destruction as one place can handle.
Take Musk for example, you really have to be fearless and delusional to think that you can build a successful electric carmaker from scratch and a company making re-usable rockets at the same time. These traits serve him positively in business, but it's no surprise to also see it manifest negatively in other areas...
He did not build a successful electric car maker, he joined tesla well after it was founded and after it had done significant amount of development. But if you examined why tesla succeeded it was not only boldness or craziness, but careful planning many many years ahead. It is not enough to do something that seems impossible, that usually ends up in failure as the thing ends up being in fact impossible.
The genius is to see how technology and public perception changes in the future as to set out in such a way that after 10-20 years of hard work the impossible will seem possible.
On the other hand his failures and many embarrassments came universally from doing things on a whim. Examples are that "funding secured" tweet and the purchase of twitter. And if you look at those embarrassments they are really more the result of narcissism than psychopathy.
So if I had to guess, I think Musk has developed more narcissistic traits later on due to his success, being surrounded by sycophants, mental exhaustion and perhaps drug use. But I don't think this is the cause of his success.
The fact that there a successful psychopaths is more an indication that we as a society have not quite created mechanisms of protecting ourselves from such people rather than any evidence that being a psychopath is somehow good.
In the places where I have worked I have seen many of these bold people wreck the business as they are moving up the ranks of said business. In one previous workplace, the business was basically destroyed by these scumbags. But if the psychologists that wrote this article examine these scumbags, they will consider them "successful psychopaths" because they gained ranked and salary quickly within the business before they destroyed the whole thing.
As I have done more work researching publicly traded companies, I have seen many companies destroyed by a bold charismatic leader that has a brilliant plan that can never succeed.
Psychologists should concentrate on creating better tests for identifying psychopaths and creating better social or work structures for protecting against psychopathic infiltration rather than making excuses for or glorifying psychopaths.
Sure, of course we shouldn't attach any stigma to being a goddamned asshole, as long as the person is smart enough to only do it when it benefits them.
“I conclude therefore that, fortune being changeful and mankind steadfast in their ways, so long as the two are in agreement men are successful, but unsuccessful when they fall out. For my part I consider that it is better to be adventurous than cautious, because fortune is a woman, and if you wish to keep her under it is necessary to beat and ill-use her; and it is seen that she allows herself to be mastered by the adventurous rather than by those who go to work more coldly. She is, therefore, always, woman-like, a lover of young men, because they are less cautious, more violent, and with more audacity command her.”
Unlike this article, at least Machiavelli didn’t pretend he was doing science.
Similarly, Polonius from Hamlet: “to thine own self be true” but spoken by a blowhard.