Why It Pays to Be a Jerk

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.

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.

Larry is guilty of a lot of things - but his high profile was very calculated and served business interests.

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.

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.

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.

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, ... )

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).

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.

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 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.

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. -- Bertrand Russell

Instead, found this, which gives sufficient documentation that, yeah, he probably was: http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10

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.

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.

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.

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...