>Measuring narcissism was tricky, Hambrick said. Self-reporting was not exactly an option, so he chose a set of indirect measures: the prominence of each CEO’s picture in the company’s annual report; the size of the CEO’s paycheck compared with that of the next-highest-paid person in the company; the frequency with which the CEO’s name appeared in company press releases. Lastly, he looked at the CEO’s use of pronouns in press interviews, comparing the frequency of the first-person plural with that of the first-person singular. Then he rolled all the results into a single narcissism indicator.
It must be nice to be able to just make up and use a method for identifying "narcissists" without having to test whether the people you're identifying as narcissists are, in fact, narcissists. In my opinion, if this is how you do research you can hardly call what you do science.
I was an Oracle Product Manager for the core database. Larry would often offer to be available for anything that might raise the profile of Oracle. He also solicited suggestions for anything high-profile to get involved with - sports, causes, whatever. He said that his goal was to be someone who could call any CEO in the world, and no matter how much that CEO might hate Oracle, the CEO would still take his call. And if the CEO took his call then Larry would use his wealth in any way possible to make the sale.
Larry is guilty of a lot of things - but his high profile was very calculated and served business interests.
Certain qualities like narcissism are not measurable precisely, so he created the next best thing, which is precisely defined according to a formula, and, hopefully, correlates highly with true narcissism. This is exactly how do you social science research
How did I know that there would be a comment like this at the top, someone criticizing the research for not being science?
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.
Why I am hardly a defender of the social sciences this is exactly how you are supposed to do this. You create a hypothesis and then you test to see if it correlates with the effect you are interested in. You of course should not develop your hypothesis and test on the same set of subjects or else you just end up with garbage.
Of course there is still the slight problem of determining whatever correlates you have found actually correlate with an abstract state like narcissism.
How would you identify if someone is in fact a narcissist? What does it mean to be a narcissist?
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.
Reminds me of that recent article that the best way to identify a narcissist is to just ask them (true narcissists will readily admit it). That line in Patton (probably my favorite movie) where he says "Hell, I know I'm a prima donna. I admit it."
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.
Yeah the first person pronoun prevlaence could just as well be a sign of personal writing style or a very non-narcissistic sense of social responsibility in wanting to be absolutely clear about what one did.
True, and the "first person singular = narcissism" equation that this makes struck me as strongly inappropriate. With this metric, a CEO who takes personal responsibility (e.g. "I instructed the finance department to do X, and I'm sorry about that but it is a necessity for reasons Y and Z") is going to be identified as a narcissist compared to the one who hides behind words weasel words like ("We architected and rolled out a brand new program, which we hope you will like very much (not)").
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.
I agree. At one of my previous employers, managers loved to casually mention the CEO's name in conversation and in emails in order to not only sound more authoritative and in-the-know, but also nip any disagreements in the bud. The CEO wasn't a narcissist at all, but if this study was conducted there they would inevitably be labeled as such.
Atlantic article has a bunch of unexamined underlying assumptions that are then presented as some false dichotomy, in order to inspire fear and self-loathing in the masses? Color me unsurprised.
There are times to be nice and times to be a jerk. That's it. You have to listen to your instincts, an activity assiduously avoided by the Atlantic demographic.
I've noticed that as I've spent time on both sides of being nice and being mean, it's easier to turn one or the other on or off depending on the situation. Eventually, I stopped being nice (or even mean) out of obligation. I've gotten a lot happier as a result. Yes, it's also a thing to cave into being a jerk out of social pressure.
Which is when we get to the unexamined foundation of this article: that we have to be nice or mean because it will "pay off" or help our position in society. This is just a bunch of bullshit because what matters isn't your personality, it's what you contributed to the world. If that means you need to kick some ass in order for your contribution to be seen, then that's ok. On the other hand if that means you need to be super friendly and nice, that's also ok. Skipping the pretension and being real is what matters, and in a large number of cases that pays off the best anyway!
> There are times to be nice and times to be a jerk. That's it. You have to listen to your instincts, an activity assiduously avoided by the Atlantic demographic.
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.
I would not say it like that. Being a jerk might be seen as necessary in a environment of political correctness and kindness. Also, sometimes, decisions being taken swiftly can mean steady progress, while not being very pleasing.
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.
Amen to being real. I've had a boss that is insecure, obviously wants to assert themselves and does so in non-direct ways, like through email, but can't do it in person and acts nice (falsely, as I've now come to learn). It drives me nuts.
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.
I think that this is a context of which country, era and industry you are in. If you are a general in the middle ages, or a wall street stock broker in the 50s, or a gangster / mafia leader in the 30s, then being a Jerk is kind of a must have to move forward. If you are a software engineer at a SF startup, not so much. Why people try to find "global truths" when it's clear that right and wrong are very, very subjective.
Being nice in highschool only works if you are the most attractive / popular person, (so does being a jerk). If you are not so attractive / smart / good in sports, then being a Jerk or being nice won't really help you...
When you are an adult, being a jerk usually never pays, unless you are surrounded by jerks and you want to fit in.
Also there is a difference between respecting people and liking people.
> When you are an adult, being a jerk usually never pays, unless you are surrounded by jerks and you want to fit in.
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).
> ...being a Jerk is kind of a must have to move forward. If you are a software engineer at a SF startup, not so much
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.
People who are nice, team players, selfless, etc. cluster near the top and the bottom of our hypothetical payscale graph.
People who are narcissistic, egotistical, entitled, and overall "assholes" also cluster near the top and the bottom of payscale graph.
But their data on narcissists only comes from CEOs?
I would suggest that in aggregate this tells us basically nothing about how one should act to get ahead (Except maybe "Avoid the middle road of only being an asshole sometimes?").
It does however suggest that narcissism might be more common among CEOs than in the general populace, although again, not a predictor of being a particularly successful one.
This is all of course setting aside the obvious problems of "How are they even defining these nebulous categories (In the case of narcissism, their measures were pretty unconvincing IMO. A lot of those decisions could have been made by marketing/PR people. There's sometimes value in the 'personal brand' of your CEO, even if they themselves are pretty humble in attitude) and even if we believe their definitions, how could they possibly be measuring them in a rigorous way in the wild"
I know people who tries to be stubborn to cover up their lack of knowledge.
Usually, those people are smarter than the majority but not quite smart enough to realize that they're not always right.
One thing I don't understand is why Steve Jobs took credit for some of the stuff that Jony Ive did (assumming this is true). He's already the CEO, so unless he was worried about Ive usurping his position, there was absolutely no point.
People talk behind your back and the truth will usually get out. It's just miscalculated and ego-driven with absolutely no gain, monetarily and socially.
Then we have the story of him scamming Wozniak over his fair share of the Atari bonus. Maybe Jobs thought they wouldn't have a long friendship left?
Forget nice or jerk for a moment, but would you sell your friendship with a genius for that small amount of money?
At this point in his life, Jobs was a nobody and without Wozniak, he would probably still be a nobody.
Imagine if Wozniak found out earlier. Imagine if Ive went over to a rival company.
Some of these jerks do not realize how long people hold grudges and what an angry person is capable of. A lot of it is just childish like a bully beating up some small kid for no reason.
It's not smart or assertive, just short-sighted. Look at how many revolutions were started by hunger and poverty. Millions of Irish people starved to death during the Potato Famine and evicted from their land while their landlords happily dined on lobster soup. The Irish Republican Army is still running around today.
It's people like this that breeds problem in the world.
Today most of us are not dying from hunger in the first world but just go back in time a little bit and you can watch these "jerks" dining on abalones, shark fins, caviar while riding inside their cozy palanquin.
They do leave some scrap left for the peasants though, enough to stay alive, work and pay tax. But they see it as theirs to begin with, so it's ok. All that generosity "trickling down".
"At this point in his life, Jobs was a nobody and without Wozniak, he would probably still be a nobody."
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.
Being a jerk and having very little empathy will definitely help you becoming successful in money and glamor sense. Not sure if that will help you to become successful in your life since your jerkiness and empathy will eventually spill over to your personal life causing life to be pretty much miserable.
But you do not need to read books to learn this: actually no book will teach you this. Life will. Sadly, sometimes that it is too late.
I don't think this is true. It's narrative nice people tell themselves to find reason in a world that has none.
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.
They aren't mutually exclusive: being nice or not is a tool in your toolbox for all interactions.
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].
But I bet you wouldn't like someone who tries to suck up to you, either. So maybe the idea is to make a good impression on others, and that might need more than simply being nice, even if you don't want to be successful.
I think that in some vague sense, self confidence (sometimes spilling over into egotism) is a requirement in order to occupy high positions.
Before you can convince others of your skill, you have to convince yourself. And even then, you have to be willing to actually take the top spot. Plenty of people are uncomfortable with earning vast amounts of money - they might want it, but the actual process of taking surplus value from underlings is something different.
Am I the only one who feels very uncomfortable with the fact people these days are using "jerk" and "asshole" as an "objective" description of other people qualities? Is it a long time since this became "normal" in English? Not only it sounds vulgar and disgusting, it is very poor way to express your opinion as well. If I'm calling you "a jerk" it means nothing except the fact I don't like something about you (which maybe also not entirely true).
Things like "putting your feet on the table" and "speaking first" are concrete and measurable, "being a jerk" is not. In fact, you cannot be "a jerk" at all, you can be somebody, who was called "a jerk" by somebody else. And why am I calling you a jerk? You can never know. Maybe I consider you being a jerk, because you don't open the door for a lady. Maybe, because you do open the door and those are being "oppressive towards female equality" or some other ridiculous thing.
I agree. I found especially ridiculous the part of the article where the author tries to dissect "asshole" into "ass" and "hole" and comes up with litmus tests to differentiate the two.
To me the logical conclusion is that in a weak and vulnerable society: it pays to be a jerk. In other words, the fact that a jerk can be a good leader just speaks poorly of those following such leader. That said, I think that the article is rooted on a stereotyped false dichotomy: I have met nice people that can sometimes act as assholes, and assholes that can be empathic.
Have you ever sat around trying to talk to a colleague with his shoes on top of the table? It's awful behavior and I can't stand it. I usually just walk away.
I like the idea of stealing coffee for the group. If you just pay for coffee from your own pocket people might look down on you, because you give something that should be yours. But if you fight for a raise and use that money to invite everybody to a party then you can achieve something and that your success also means a betterment for the others.
Was Steve Jobs really a jerk? In any case there seems to be a lot of cargo cult in this theory. Even if SJ was a jerk, it doesn't follow that by being a jerk you could be as successful as SJ, or even that SJ was successful because he was a jerk (if he was).
Spent a few minutes trying to find the one extremely rude email he once wrote to a customer, since he liked to do that from time to time and it stuck in my head.
i can't wait until brain imaging technology improves and we can make sociopaths and narcissists wear a government-mandated scarlet letter letting everyone know how dangerous they are.
[+] [-] Aqwis|10 years ago|reply
It must be nice to be able to just make up and use a method for identifying "narcissists" without having to test whether the people you're identifying as narcissists are, in fact, narcissists. In my opinion, if this is how you do research you can hardly call what you do science.
[+] [-] MrTonyD|10 years ago|reply
Larry is guilty of a lot of things - but his high profile was very calculated and served business interests.
[+] [-] vasilipupkin|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hnnewguy|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] danieltillett|10 years ago|reply
Of course there is still the slight problem of determining whatever correlates you have found actually correlate with an abstract state like narcissism.
[+] [-] msellout|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dpweb|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] quietplatypus|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] parennoob|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] enraged_camel|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quietplatypus|10 years ago|reply
There are times to be nice and times to be a jerk. That's it. You have to listen to your instincts, an activity assiduously avoided by the Atlantic demographic.
I've noticed that as I've spent time on both sides of being nice and being mean, it's easier to turn one or the other on or off depending on the situation. Eventually, I stopped being nice (or even mean) out of obligation. I've gotten a lot happier as a result. Yes, it's also a thing to cave into being a jerk out of social pressure.
Which is when we get to the unexamined foundation of this article: that we have to be nice or mean because it will "pay off" or help our position in society. This is just a bunch of bullshit because what matters isn't your personality, it's what you contributed to the world. If that means you need to kick some ass in order for your contribution to be seen, then that's ok. On the other hand if that means you need to be super friendly and nice, that's also ok. Skipping the pretension and being real is what matters, and in a large number of cases that pays off the best anyway!
[+] [-] mistermann|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jokoon|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] noobermin|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] erikb|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eranation|10 years ago|reply
Being nice in highschool only works if you are the most attractive / popular person, (so does being a jerk). If you are not so attractive / smart / good in sports, then being a Jerk or being nice won't really help you... When you are an adult, being a jerk usually never pays, unless you are surrounded by jerks and you want to fit in.
Also there is a difference between respecting people and liking people.
[+] [-] gutnor|10 years ago|reply
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, ... )
[+] [-] l33tbro|10 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] lucaspiller|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] erikb|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] advael|10 years ago|reply
People who are nice, team players, selfless, etc. cluster near the top and the bottom of our hypothetical payscale graph.
People who are narcissistic, egotistical, entitled, and overall "assholes" also cluster near the top and the bottom of payscale graph.
But their data on narcissists only comes from CEOs?
I would suggest that in aggregate this tells us basically nothing about how one should act to get ahead (Except maybe "Avoid the middle road of only being an asshole sometimes?").
It does however suggest that narcissism might be more common among CEOs than in the general populace, although again, not a predictor of being a particularly successful one.
This is all of course setting aside the obvious problems of "How are they even defining these nebulous categories (In the case of narcissism, their measures were pretty unconvincing IMO. A lot of those decisions could have been made by marketing/PR people. There's sometimes value in the 'personal brand' of your CEO, even if they themselves are pretty humble in attitude) and even if we believe their definitions, how could they possibly be measuring them in a rigorous way in the wild"
[+] [-] WalterSear|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thelogos|10 years ago|reply
I know people who tries to be stubborn to cover up their lack of knowledge.
Usually, those people are smarter than the majority but not quite smart enough to realize that they're not always right.
One thing I don't understand is why Steve Jobs took credit for some of the stuff that Jony Ive did (assumming this is true). He's already the CEO, so unless he was worried about Ive usurping his position, there was absolutely no point.
People talk behind your back and the truth will usually get out. It's just miscalculated and ego-driven with absolutely no gain, monetarily and socially.
Then we have the story of him scamming Wozniak over his fair share of the Atari bonus. Maybe Jobs thought they wouldn't have a long friendship left?
Forget nice or jerk for a moment, but would you sell your friendship with a genius for that small amount of money?
At this point in his life, Jobs was a nobody and without Wozniak, he would probably still be a nobody.
Imagine if Wozniak found out earlier. Imagine if Ive went over to a rival company.
Some of these jerks do not realize how long people hold grudges and what an angry person is capable of. A lot of it is just childish like a bully beating up some small kid for no reason.
It's not smart or assertive, just short-sighted. Look at how many revolutions were started by hunger and poverty. Millions of Irish people starved to death during the Potato Famine and evicted from their land while their landlords happily dined on lobster soup. The Irish Republican Army is still running around today.
It's people like this that breeds problem in the world. Today most of us are not dying from hunger in the first world but just go back in time a little bit and you can watch these "jerks" dining on abalones, shark fins, caviar while riding inside their cozy palanquin.
They do leave some scrap left for the peasants though, enough to stay alive, work and pay tax. But they see it as theirs to begin with, so it's ok. All that generosity "trickling down".
Being a jerk pays, until it doesn't.
[+] [-] Turing_Machine|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tlogan|10 years ago|reply
But you do not need to read books to learn this: actually no book will teach you this. Life will. Sadly, sometimes that it is too late.
[+] [-] thelogos|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] codeoclock|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mildbow|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] erikb|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vermooten|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] xyproto|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stegosaurus|10 years ago|reply
Before you can convince others of your skill, you have to convince yourself. And even then, you have to be willing to actually take the top spot. Plenty of people are uncomfortable with earning vast amounts of money - they might want it, but the actual process of taking surplus value from underlings is something different.
[+] [-] amelius|10 years ago|reply
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. -- Bertrand Russell
[+] [-] krick|10 years ago|reply
Things like "putting your feet on the table" and "speaking first" are concrete and measurable, "being a jerk" is not. In fact, you cannot be "a jerk" at all, you can be somebody, who was called "a jerk" by somebody else. And why am I calling you a jerk? You can never know. Maybe I consider you being a jerk, because you don't open the door for a lady. Maybe, because you do open the door and those are being "oppressive towards female equality" or some other ridiculous thing.
[+] [-] reddytowns|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tremols|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Eye_of_Mordor|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ronnier|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erikb|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nhebb|10 years ago|reply
http://www.amazon.com/What-Would-Machiavelli-Justify-Meannes...
[+] [-] facepalm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _qf3i|10 years ago|reply
Instead, found this, which gives sufficient documentation that, yeah, he probably was: http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10
[+] [-] morpheous|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AndyKelley|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amagumori|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pizza|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smegel|10 years ago|reply
Some jobs require bad people.