Do jerks make better leaders?

And now, of course, there’s Walter Isaacson’s bestselling biography of Jobs, which amply documents his capacity for abusiveness and petulance, and his tantrums worthy of a wasted rock star. Here as with Patton, apologists discern the hand of a gifted manager. According to Alan Deutschman in Newsweek, Jobs was a “master of psychological manipulation” who found that “many of the most brilliant engineers and creative types actually responded well to cruel criticism, since it reinforced their own secret belief that they weren’t living up to their vaunted potential.”

People are of different minds about that. I know of one Apple engineer who says he left the company because he got tired of wiping Jobs’ spittle off his glasses. But as Robert Sutton, author of the business bestseller The No Asshole Rule , has noted, “Everyone has their own private Steve Jobs. It usually tells you a lot about them—and little about Jobs.” Most of the would-be masters of the universe who take Patton or Jobs as their personal models aren’t choosing assholism as a career expedient, they’re looking to justify their predilection for it.

Gallery

How to be a bad boss: Washington Post readers respond to the article “How to completely, utterly destroy an employee’s work life,” and share their own “advice” for making employees miserable.

Gallery

Stephen Covey’s ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’: A look at author Stephen Covey’s “habits” through the prism of seven successful leaders.

Yet on consideration, being a jerk is a less essential leadership qualification than those people suppose. The leadership shelves are also brimming with wisdom drawn from the likes of John Wooden, Gandhi, the apostle Paul and Captain Picard, none of whom brings the A-word to mind. Nor do the great majority of the CEOs of the companies on Barron’s “Most Respected” list. Still, with a few exceptions (think of Berkshire Hathaway) it’s the jerks whose names we’re most likely to know.   

And there’s the problem. There are certainly no more of these abusers populating the corner suites than there were in ages past—compared to the likes of Jay Gould and Henry Clay Frick, even Chainsaw Al is a pussycat. But the type has become a singular obsession for us. Every age seizes on one social miscreant to personify its deepest social anxieties, as the cad did for Trollope and the phony did for Holden Caulfield. And the asshole is ours.  

I’m not talking about the run-of-the-mill despots and weasels that no workplace is ever wholly free of, but the figures who manage to make their nastiness a central thread of their public persona. Year in and year out, candidates for the A-word make up about half of Barbara Walters’ list of most fascinating people—a disproportion even for the worlds of entertainment, sports and politics from which Walters draws her candidates. And the spectacle of people acting like jerks to one another has become a reliable business model for reality TV, talk radio and cable “news.”

We’re on a first-name basis with them: A-Rod, Omarosa, Rush, Kanye, Newt, Kim, Charlie, Mel, Tiger, Donald. You don’t have to love them, but you have to concede that Walters is right—they do fascinate us. So it isn’t surprising that our attention should also fasten on the business leaders who belong to that breed.

Well, they do make better copy. But it’s a risky point of departure for someone starting out on a career. True, every once in a while an A-word aspirant manages to percolate to the executive dining room on the strength of audacity alone. But the majority wind up seven job changes later, still in the company cafeteria, eating lunch alone.

Nunberg is a professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Information. He is the linguist contributor on the NPR show Fresh Air and the author, most recently, of Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years.

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