[jennasys]

There are CEOs that are narcissistic, and there are CEOs that have NPD. The first will be awful to work with, and the latter will destroy your life if you hang around long enough. This is from first hand experience.

I placed myself in-between a NPD CEO and the rest of the company I was at in an effort to fix the company culture which was toxic when I started. It took a year but it worked. I put in a lot of effort to make it a nice place to work at. I left after 2 years, and within 6 months the entire management staff had quit or was fired after I left.

People with NPD don't know they are monsters. They take credit and place blame without exception. They view everyone as beneath them and treat everyone as disposable. This guy said out loud that he doesn't like win-win deals - it must be win-lose. Taking something away from another person made him feel better about himself.

I'm not sure I'll ever heal from that experience.

[ashtonkem]

It is hard to overstate how bad working for someone who meets the diagnostic criteria for NPD or BPD can be. There is a big, scary gap between someone being a bit egotistical, and someone who has NPD. Even being in a non-hierarchical relationship with someone with NPD can be capital B bad.

[stuntkite]

Personality disorders leave a huge wake of destruction when untreated and unrecognized. Also they are problematic and lead to a lot of hurt even when someone is recognizing the problem and working on it. Something that gets lost frequently in the dialog is the value, a seemingly critical value, that these people contribute to society even if it's at a great cost. A lot of times, especially in our current world climate as conversations about this topic grow, we otherize people who suffer from these conditions. IMO, that is dangerous. It creates a stigma and decreases the likelihood for a person with these conditions to allow themselves to see it for what it is and let it fester into constant malignant destruction of themselves and anyone near them. I personally steer clear of people with NPD/BPD. I was raised by someone with NPD and as such I can be kind of a magnet and ill equipped to set boundaries. My point is, people should educate themselves on the conditions and set boundaries and do their best not to enable, but those that can should encourage sufferers to acknowledge and integrate their disorder to reduce harm and utilize their unique minds in a way that takes other lives into account. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy does wonders. I realize it's almost being a human sacrifice to help someone with NPD or BPD transition thought patterns. I don't wish it on anyone... but someone's gotta do the work, this part of humanity isn't going to go away.