I have a problem with Nassim Taleb. On the one hand I think he has been a colossal jerk to many good people who don't deserve it. On the other hand he keeps dropping pearls of wisdom that I value highly.
If I were an employer I wouldn't want an employee with his level of toxicity laying waste to morale. But it could be exactly that kind of employee who could make the company profitable with the power of one brain.
So I'd go with a default policy of no brilliant jerks, but be willing to override it for some values of brilliant and jerk.
That is what is called a 10x people manager, and they are even more rare than 10x engineers. Not to mention they tend to get promoted too quickly to stay in jerk handling roles for very long.
Exactly!! I can’t stand his smug, self-satisfied style, and yet he has some of the most insightful thoughts around. One day, maybe I’ll grind my teeth through one of his books.
It's very difficult for me to separate the brilliant from the jerk in Taleb's writing. When he says "you can't make that inference because the distribution has a fat tail and you're a dumb fuck" I can't tell whether the sentiment embedded in this statement is clouding his judgement. So ultimately all the drama surrounding the brilliant jerk makes him far less useful than you might initially think.
I sometimes wish I have the presence of mind to add the dry remark -"I agree that that's your opinion." The one time I was able to actually pull it off, it deflated the jerk.
Edited [1]: Ironically, one sign of brilliance is the ability to hold two seemingly contradictory ideas in your head. I think many people who interacted with Steve Jobs would classify him as a jerk. However, if Apple was more inclined towards mitigating his jerky behavior, it might not be where it is today.
Reality is complicated. You don't get at the truth by finding the absolutist statement that is correct most of the time. You have to conduct a more holistic analysis than that. What causes this person to be a jerk? Has the very behavior that caused them to be a jerk also led to the founding of this company? Would they lose their passion if we tried to cage them like a pet bird? If so, how critical is their passion to this company? What if they're absolutely, 100% right about something and they're being a "jerk" because they are trying to communicate precisely how much they think they're right and how wrong everyone else is? How right have they been in the past?
On top of asking the right questions, you need to do a first principles analysis. What drives this company to be profitable in a competitive context? Why do we want to reduce tension in this company? Is it because that tension is bad for profit? Are you sure?
[1]: I removed the following from the top of my comment: "There are "No" brilliant jerks? Absolutely none? What evidence is that based on?" because a below commenter is right that it doesn't really fit the primary meaning of the headline. My core point remains pretty much the same though.
If you don't want brilliant jerks, you are inherently negating their brilliance. A simple chain of logic, extrapolating from that headline, would lead to "if they truly were all around brilliant, they wouldn't act that way. They would be more brilliant if we replaced their non-brilliant side with our brilliant behavioral prescriptions."
I'm not defending being a jerk. Personally, I try to be kind in all my interpersonal interactions. However, some people are just a package deal. Call it what you want, high IQ and low EQ or whatever, but you can't just accept one part of them and try to get rid of the rest.
Also, with regards to this comment: "Valuing non-jerkiness more isn’t “negating brilliance”. Brilliant non-jerks are available."
Sure, there's no shortage of brilliant non-jerks, but sometimes the most brilliant person for a given company in a given context (by an order of magnitude) is a jerk. You have to apply first principles, systems thinking to determine whether they're right for the company or not, and whether mitigating their jerky behavior is bad for the company or not. I don't totally disagree with the article. Sometimes the measures they recommend are well-advised, and sometimes they would be misguided. I'm cautioning about the latter because it's such a common human instinct to try to cast out or sheer the black sheep. On the margins, group harmony is overrated.
It doesn't matter if they're the best by an order of magnitude if their jerkiness demotivates 10 other people. And I doubt that 'order of magnitude' statement.
A lot of people consider Elon Musk to be a jerk, and it would be a huge shame if he’s removed from his company. In most contexts what you said is 100% correct.
I sometimes wonder if I might be a jerk. I regularly ponder this topic, and think of ways I can mitigate. I've delivered an increased amount of business value (not by being "brilliant", but rather, just pragmatic)-- and that required making some breaking changes. Engineers in other parts of the organization who use the same software are of course inconvenienced by this. I've put a lot of effort into minimizing where the changes are breaking, but it seems impossible to appease my colleagues. Was breaking the psychological safety of inter-team communication worth it, if it means the business can meet its goals more quickly and effectively?
No, that sounds like leadership. Being a brilliant jerk, to my mind, is making thoughtless changes constantly and rapidly.
There are times when you have no choice but to be disruptive. The trick, as I see it, is to only be as disruptive that you need Be and no more. And when you are disruptive, be prepared for breakage that needs to be repaired, and be ready to communicate - extensively.
Also: you had better not be wrong in your disruption.
I feel Jerks tend to be people with little empathy for peoples feelings and high affinity for reality and the truth at the expense of everyones emotions.
While most people don't officially define a "Jerk" with the definition above, I feel that the personalities most people perceive as Jerks fit the definition above perfectly.
It's just people are unable to see past the "lack of empathy." They are unable to see that the while some actions lack empathy, they are also in line with truth and reality.
That is the ultimate question... What kind of company do you want to build or work for. Do you want a company full of yes men and people who respect others? Do you want a company where people lack respect and lay the god awful truth on the table? Or do you want something in between?
I feel to get something in between you need a few Jerks within the organization.
I think I can add to your observation: The difference between a good leader and a jerk can come down to ego. A good leader may have to make a decision despite hurting feelings and enduring bad emotions, but will make the decision based on the right path even if they suffer too. Jerks will make decisions that upset others but will go to the mat to defend their own feelings and emotions.
For jerks, it's not "anything to make this happen." It's "anything to make me happen."
What if being a bit of a jerk is a requirement to make progress in some environments?
When everyone is blockading everyone else, and becomes comfortable in that artificial ground-state, it takes some energy input to push things over into an actual better state. It won't happen on its own. People need to take ownership of decisions in order to make real change, but in a comfortable mutual blockade everyone seeks to avoid ownership so they don't get left holding the bag, so to speak.
The difference between someone who is an effective maverick (even on a small scale where the term would be a joke) and someone who is just a jerk comes down to attitude and approach. There's always a positive, inclusive, hey-at-least-I-offered sort of approach, and a negative, exclusive, my-way-or-the-highway approach.
I worked in academic IT for a while ages ago and the mutual blockade was the standard approach. Nothing got done, nothing got better, and it was always someone else's fault. Get individuals one-on-one and you'd always get a very rational sounding explanation of the situation and how they're hamstrung, get people together and you'd always get denial, and truly nobody wanted to unravel the Gordian knot, because it was a comfortable and familiar evil.
I happened to find myself lead on a project with a lot of autonomy, and also seconded to another project where I was a mere serf at the same time.
On the former, which was to roll out commodity desktop management stuff to a very fractured base of IT (each faculty had its own staff and a fair bit of infra, tiny little datacenters, etc), I took a very open-source, 'bazaar' style approach; produced a free, federated, sane-defaults, customizable system that was not overly prescriptive, and introduced it to those faculties one by one until 90% of the university was happily running it and working together better than before. This did require that I run afoul of people who were comfortable with the status quo, at least until I could eventually bring them around; but because I maintained a default open position the entire time, essentially being very modest and classy about the fact that my system was going to take over everything else, I won people over. A lot of the time, they're really just casting about looking for leadership, which is better defined as 'an individual willing to take risks and own consequences'.
On the latter, which was an ITIL project, the project manager had the exact opposite approach. Big expensive proprietary system, nothing federated or optional, his way or get lost. He made enemies at every turn, because instead of bringing them clarity and capability, he instead tried to use power and control to make people do what he wanted, without any real concession to it providing commensurate value for them. He ruled his own team like a tyrant, shutting down any ideas I had, expecting me to work against a requirements doc and not question anything.
Only through my own skunkworks approach and through using political capital I had accumulated on the other project was able to bring anyone onboard in anything more than a mandated sense; but the project ultimately failed because people did not want to let a jerk win, and in the case of academia where they're hard to fire, they felt comfortable resisting.
The moral here is that there's definitely a role for someone pushing large effective change, change that people may resist - in fact, it's critical - but you have to do it in a way that offers a continual and permanent olive branch to everyone, always giving them a chance to join in, never rubbing their face in anything, never holding vendettas or grudges. This is a hard thing for many humans to accomplish.
Not directly related to the content of the article, but...
There are jerks everywhere, and there always will be. Like diseases, tornadoes and mosquitoes, they are part of life.
I think our energy is better spent creating an env that empowers nice people and encourage them to defend themselves. An env that calls out bad behavior.
Society has mostly tolerated jerks - Bill Gates was a jerk during his Microsoft days, Steve Jobs too, etc. Hollywood has a long list of jerks, bordering on criminal level behavior. Somehow they were (are) tolerated by society, many people even believe one needs to be a jerk at certain levels to succeed.
If a junior person on a team is a jerk, he'll be called out quickly vs a boss who is a jerk. Like everything in life, one can get away with a lot of bad behavior if they are high up in the food chain.
Er, was Bill Gates a jerk? How are we defining it?
He was aggressive towards his competitors, certainly, perhaps too much. His decisions around the web were perhaps "jerk-like".
But normally this word means he was nasty to other people he worked with. There are mixed stories about that. A lot of them boil down to him being a boss who simply expected good results and made his expectations clear.
If you look at CEOs of successful companies there are always lots of people ready to describe them as jerks. Mostly when asked to back that up, you get stories where they were just firm with people about what level of performance was required - the sort of thing any CEO needs to do.
You could also flip this around and say “No weak willed overly sensitive people”
Most people are fine with jerks. Just like most people aren’t jerks. It’s when the minority group “jerks” intersects with minority group “wimps” that problems show up.
And I would say both groups are equally toxic to company culture.
I’ve worked with plenty of jerks and it doesn’t really bother me. I, like most well adjusted people, say “that person is just a jerk, whatever” and move on with my day.
Wimps grind the entire company to a halt because we all need to focus on their wellbeing 24/7 because they can’t do that.
It’s not to say wimps are bad. It’s just that wimps can kill a company culture just like jerks do. And more often than not, it’s the combination of the two that really causes most of the trouble.
Nothing is more damaging to a company than an over performing jerk and an underperforming wimp on the same team.
Every leader you love or hate is a jerk. You only call the ones you hate "jerks".
If there was an accurate adjective for Steve Jobs, even those who adored him would acknowledge that "jerk" is too kind of a descriptor. But he held onto more goodwill than this article's sacrificial lambs of Musk, Kalanick, Neumann, and Winterkorn.
This "no brilliant jerks" reminds me a bit of the anti-bully sentiment. Real bullies are popular, socially calibrated and powerful. The condemnation of "bullies" is for leaping hate on social failures with the temerity to lash out at their betters.
There's a point where a Jerk becomes Toxic; you shouldn't have people that are trending towards toxic. It's obvious when a person gets to the toxic stage, but you have to put up barriers before that stage, otherwise bad behavior will escalate to the point of toxicity.
Whether you like it or not. If we look past 21st century culture and look back upon history...
- Caesar (killed/enslaved 1 million+ gauls)
- Augustus (killed anyone who posed a political threat, killed a lot in general)
- Genghis Khan (killed... well, he killed a lot)
- Napoleon (got hundreds of thousands of people from every European nation killed)
- The list goes on.
Name one famous historical figure who had power of some sort who didn't do anything "jerk-like".
The problem with the "jerk" definition is that the author nor most people have ever been in a position of great power. He does not understand how difficult and stressful it is to be the CEO of a big company or a top political leader.
I believe that in a position of great power, the power holder is forced to do some "jerk-like" things. You gotta make harsh decisions.
E.g. if Augustus didn't kill off all his political opponents (including Caesar's supposed only biological son), it is likely Rome will be thrown into more civil war.
Every guy has a "jerk" inside of them, and when put into a stressful situation, they are capable of using it.
> Name one famous historical figure who had power of some sort who didn't do anything "jerk-like".
That’s a straw man. Everyone is a jerk sometimes.
There have been great people who changed the world without a predominantly jerky reputation. I don’t find much evidence Einstein was considered one, for example.
It sound apologetic to me to write their jerkiness to stress and high responsibility of leadership.
> Name one famous historical figure who had power of some sort who didn't do anything "jerk-like".
Since the list are of kings, I namedrop Marcus Aurelius.
Add power and stress to unchecked emotional and psychological deficiencies of the susceptible person of power strong enough to derail their sense of ethics and morality and one comes face to face with a war criminal, a psychopath dictator, or a jerky maverick CEO.
Increase or decrease elements to get Caligula or Steve Jobs.
> I believe that in a position of great power, the power holder is forced to do some "jerk-like" things. You gotta make harsh decisions.
One of your examples is Hitler for God's sake. Everybody else eventually bundled to fight him, including second biggest murderer of the time. And no, Hitler did not done what he done because he had no other choice as a powerful man. Seriously.
You literally collected the biggest psychopaths and claim "this is how leaders must be". Nope, we as a whole do very well when people like these are under control and don't get power.
We really really don't need Hitlers and Napoleons.
>“Often the board does not act sufficiently suspicious. Only a small percentage of directors are good at pushing back. They tend to trust the CEO too much”
It's not about trust. It's about politics. They may not actually trust the CEO but to keep their position and good standing they have to pretend to trust the CEO.
The only thing that matters is who determines what a “jerk” is. The same behavior may be excused in one person and condemned in another.
It’s one thing to write this, but quite another to actually rein in a CEO with a ton of clout and success at their back (Adam Neumann 2020 is not the same as Adam Neumann 2018). Hand waving “oh well you have to curate the culture” isn’t enough.
Unrelated to the content of the comment, but since this comment was immediately dead (saw it at "0 minutes ago"): what's with the new moderation technique of just marking comments of some users as dead from the moment they post?
I've seen this more and more recently. Is that a new approach to shadow banning? Is that automatically applied when multiple comments are flagged by some amount of people? Are the affected users aware, or is that hidden from them while they're logged in?
> what's with the new moderation technique of just marking comments of some users as dead from the moment they post?
That's not new, and most of those people have been told that they were banned.
People can vouch for individual comments (click the timestamp, click the vouch link) to undead them. If you think a person is being unfairly moderated I guess you can email the mods to let them know.
Thanks, it appears to be the autokilling then and I must have just noticed it more in the past few days. It seemed weird because there's so much that I consider normal/harmless (and where much worse is left alive), but the authors may of course have posted more problematic comments in the past that lead to the flags.
Jerks exist because they've been selected by Natural Selection.
Either the existence of a Jerk helps the Jerk himself survive and propagate his genes or the existence of a Jerk within a group helps groups that contain jerks survive.
If you think about it at a very surface level. Everyone hates Jerks so why does a Jerk even exist at all? Everything a Jerk does will lower his individual chances of survival by making people hate them. Humans are social creatures and an anti-social person likely will not survive if the group hates them.
Group dynamics of humans will ultimately select out Jerks. That is unless the Jerk has something to offer beyond making everyone hate them.
Obviously Jerks exist in our world, so their continued existence must offer something beneficial to the group. What would that be?
So imagine this situation. There's a software engineer at a company who's well liked. He's super nice, friendly, good-looking BUT he's ultimately not a very good software engineer. His skills are well below average, his boss knows it, everyone who's worked with him knows it, the only people who don't seem to know it is he himself and people who haven't directly worked with him. His skills are so poor that he would be fired if he wasn't so well liked.
Therein lies the problem. His Boss likes him but is unable to be honest with him about how his skills are so horrible that he'll be fired if everyone knows about how shitty his skills are. The person is so nice and well liked that not only is his career getting protected but his feelings are being protected as well because nobody wants to be a Jerk and hurt those feelings by telling him the reality.
Then a real Jerk of a person is suddenly assigned to work with this nice guy. The Jerk immediately sees the problem and reveals the truth to everyone. The Jerk regularly says things along the lines of: "This guy is useless, he doesn't know shit, the guy can't even code properly. His code is complete garbage." The Jerk publicly says these things and reveals to everyone the reality of the situation.
These are very toxic words that introduce aggression into the workplace.
But the Jerk introduces truth into the workplace. The Jerk was the only person who tells things like it is at face value. If the Jerk wasn't there, the well liked person would continue to be in that role and function as a parasite with the person himself and most of the company oblivious to the reality of the situation.
The cost of empathy is a mask placed over reality.
If your organization doesn't have Jerks then I almost guarantee that there is very likely to be huge issues within the organization that are masked by etiquette. The Jerk is essentially telling the truth and revealing big issues at great cost to himself. It's almost a form of self sacrifice.
In my my mind the Jerk exists because he benefits the group, but his actions come at great cost to his individual survival because Jerks aren't well liked.
Additionally I would argue that the term "Jerk" is a misnomer. Someone who is explicit about the truth should not be called a Jerk, especially when the truth comes at such a high cost.
The real Jerk is someone who deliberately covers up the truth. A manipulative person is never called a Jerk. A company without a single Jerk, a company where people have nearly perfect etiquette and friendly communication is also a company with a high number of manipulative people and likely deep problems that aren't discussed.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather deal with an oblivious Jerk than a well liked manipulator.
We have seen decades of general stagnation compared to decades of new inventions and growth before that. [Just imagine a bunch of quotes from Peter Thiel here. You read or heard the argument already.]
Good chunk of it is probably due to our societies getting physically older. But how much can be attributed to the culture of being nice, getting along, not rocking the boat, undermining people, etc?
OP ironically even advises to be contrarian to the contrarians. Pretty ingenious rhetoric.
Innovative companies like DEC, Bell Labs, and Xerox Parc (not so much IBM) ran on playful maturity, not on jerkish narcissism.
Generally they were not terrible places to work - unlike the kind of startup that's a playground for dark triad people with emotional handicaps.
The latter are destructive. A small minority get shit done, but only some proportion of the shit that gets done turns out to be truly beneficial. The rest is just a toxic mess of bullshit, lies, self-aggrandising posturing, manipulation, and empathy-free exploitation, sometimes with a side order of overt fraud and criminality.
And there's been a lot more of that in recent decades than in the real-adults-but-at-play innovation powerhouses of the 50s, 60s and 70s.
And those destructive startups are run by people who seem "nice" in person but who enact their own sinister agenda, maybe while tricking themselves into thinking they're doing good.
Being "nice" and being a good person are two different things.
I like turning it around and asking: why do human beings seem unable to achieve these heights without a jerk pushing them?
I have a loose hypothesis of my own.
Most of us are wired for a vastly slower and quieter pace of life with very little change and very few large opportunities. Think hunter gatherers or simple agriculture, the environment and evolutionary pressures at play for 99.99% of our history.
Now we have a very different environment: fast, lots of change, and lots of opportunities for huge gains everywhere.
By the standards of this environment we basically all suffer from low grade depression and anhedonia. We are literally wired to watch the corn grow.
But there are freaks. There are manics, bipolar people, high functioning psychopaths, people who are wired for fast opportunity grabbing and risk taking. Unfortunately these freaks being outliers are also often burdened by mental illness that comes with the package they got, and the odd way they are treated by society (as either gods or devils but never just peers) distorts their personality formation.
They are wired in some ways for this environment, but they are socially deeply maladjusted. Jerks.
We sort of use these people in an odd way. We make them leaders and via the mirror neuron effect borrow some of their drive. Then when their jerkish behavior gets too severe or things are not going well, we sacrifice the king.
This seems to be how regular people are able to adapt to the present fast forwarded hypermodern environment.
The other way is drugs. There are drugs like amphetamine that seem to allow regular humans to retune their brains for the current environment without borrowing motivation from a jerk. Unfortunately these come with major side effects and due to habituation the effects are not sustainable and stop working after a while.
> We have seen decades of general stagnation compared to decades of new inventions and growth before that.
I strongly disagree with this premise. We've seen a huge amount of refinement and polish in existing areas. You can't call that stagnation. It is less visible, but still a huge amount of value created.
> "But how much can be attributed to the culture of being nice, getting along, not rocking the boat, undermining people, etc?"
How many jerks are hailed as geniuses because they are good at presenting the work of others well? How many because they outright stole other people's work?
If I were an employer I wouldn't want an employee with his level of toxicity laying waste to morale. But it could be exactly that kind of employee who could make the company profitable with the power of one brain.
So I'd go with a default policy of no brilliant jerks, but be willing to override it for some values of brilliant and jerk.