Narcissism pros and cons

A reader sent me this article discussing recent research on the pros and cons of narcissism in business leaders. According to the research, narcissism is good up to a point because it often gives people the determination, confidence, and drive to pursue difficult and risky tasks. At a certain point, however, people don't like dealing with the narcissist as a boss, motivation drops, and unchecked narcissism can lead to unnecessary and stupid risks and an personal agenda substituting for the broader group agenda.

The article uses Steve Jobs as an example. Being a raging narcissist facilitated his early development of Apple, but once the company achieved a particular size and needed to keep attracting new talent, it became a detriment. During his time away from Apple, he learned lessons in humility that helped him become an even better business leader when he returned to run Apple 11 years later.

Not only does the article/research do a good job of examining both the pros and cons of a trait that we often associate as being negative, it also deals explicitly with the idea that people's personalities are more fluid than many people give them credit for, otherwise how would Steve Jobs be able to learn humility:

“Even if you have a narcissistic leader, and in a sense it’s causing them to be less effective in certain ways, people can proactively practice virtues like humility and develop their character,” Owens said. “Over time, it will begin to stick and enhance their leadership effectiveness.

Also, I don't know why this did, but one thing that surprised me about people's reaction to the book was some people were really turned off by what they perceived to be my narcissism and some people were really turned on by what they perceived to be my larger than life confidence. For some reason, it tended to split along gender lines with women being much more likely to be turned off and men much more likely to be attracted to it. I wonder why?

Manipulate like a spy

A reader sent me this Forbes article covering the book "Work Like a Spy: Business Tips from a Former CIA Officer" by former spy J.C. Carleson.


Bits from the article:

• “When I talk about manipulation, people get squeamish,” she says. “For CIA officers, ‘manipulate’ isn’t a bad word. It’s not a cynical mindset. It’s a proactive approach to exploiting opportunities.”
• You won’t be able to manipulate yourself into a promotion without basic competence. “I recommend that people start on paper,” says Carleson. “Establish a baseline of competence in your work product. Then build the relationships.”
• Carleson says CIA officers attempting to recruit a spy use what they call a “hook,” which has three parts: a reason to meet once, a reason to connect and a reason to continue meeting. The same process applies when trying to connect with a decision maker, she says—but ditch the elevator pitch. Once you have their attention, she advises not to sell yourself. Instead, connect with the person based on a common interest.
• “People tend to make decisions based on assumptions,” she says. “Understand their vulnerabilities.”
• People like to talk about themselves, she says. By asking questions and listening carefully to the answers, you can reflect back their values as your own.

Q&As (part 2)

(cont.)


Do you think that sociopaths are born or created? 

Most researchers think that there is both a genetic and environmental component to sociopathy. I think I received my genetic component from my father’s birth father, who abandoned his  family, lost the family fortune on a vanity project, and had prominent facial scarring from all of the risky behavior he engaged in over the years. The environmental component was my unstable childhood home with an unpredictable and often-violent father and a sometimes hysterical mother.

You were raised Mormon, graduated from Brigham Young University, and teach Sunday school. How do you reconcile that with being a sociopath?

Being raised Mormon is probably the reason why I am not in prison. More than anything else, the church taught me that actions have consequences. I learned certain choices might look like they would make me happy but ultimately would leave me worse off. The Mormon church and its members were also a stabilizing force in my family life. When my parents weren’t around, we had our teachers, leaders, and friends’ parents to pick up the slack. I can honestly say my life has been better for being a church member, and so I remain.

You believe that sociopaths have a natural competitive advantage. Why?

Sociopaths have several skills that lend themselves to success in areas such as politics and business: charm, an ability to see and exploit weaknesses/flaws (which in politics is called “power-broking,” and in business, “arbitrage”), confidence, unflagging optimism, an ability to think outside the box and come up with original ideas, and a lack of squeamishness about doing what it takes to get ahead.

If you don’t have a sense of morality, or feel the emotions that most people do, how are you able to operate in the world without being detected?

I think everyone learns to lie about his or her emotions to a certain extent; I just take it a step farther. People ask, “How are you?” and you respond, “fine,” even though you had a fight with your spouse that morning, have a sick child, or any multitude of things that make it hard for you to feel fine about almost anything in your life. You could honestly answer the question, but you don’t because overt displays of strong emotion in ordinary social interactions are not accepted. Most of the time I don’t need to show any emotion at all, and I try to limit the times that I do by begging off attending funerals, weddings, etc. When I do show up to these functions, I try to mimic the other attendees. If I’m dealing with a person one-on-one, I just try to reflect their emotions; usually they’re distracted enough by their own overflowing emotions not to notice my lack of them.

Professional sociopath

I lawyer friend of mine sent me this article about how Kevin Dutton claims in his book, "Wisdom of Psychopaths" about professions that psychopaths are particularly well-suited for due to their "Seven Deadly Wins," "ruthlessness, charm, focus, mental toughness, fearlessness, mindfulness and action."

Dutton says some professions attract people with psychopathic tendencies, and lawyers are second on the list. The Post quotes one successful lawyer who spoke to Dutton. “Deep inside me there’s a serial killer lurking somewhere,” the lawyer says. “But I keep him amused with cocaine, Formula One, booty calls, and coruscating cross-examination.” 

Dutton developed his list of the top psychopathic professions through an online survey last year, he told Smithsonian.com in an interview. “Any situation where you’ve a got a power structure, a hierarchy, the ability to manipulate or wield control over people, you get psychopaths doing very well,” Dutton said.

Formula One, booty calls, and coruscating cross-examination? It's a little hard to take that guy seriously. Here are the other professions:


1) CEO

2) Lawyer

3) Media (TV/radio)

4) Salesperson

5) Surgeon

6) Journalist

7) Police officer

8) Clergyperson

9) Chef

10) Civil servant


I love the "civil servant" one. In fact, it's tempting to think that every civil servant I have had to interact with has some personality disorder or another.

The Gervais Principle (part 2)

The second part talks about how sociopaths and non sociopaths (losers or clueless) behave.

On how sociopaths behave:

The bulk of Sociopath communication takes places out in the open, coded in Powertalk, right in the presence of non-Sociopaths (a decent 101 level example of this is in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, when Hermoine is the only one who realizes that Prof. Umbridge’s apparently bland and formulaic speech is a Powertalk speech challenging Dumbledore). As the David-Jim example shows, Sociopaths are in fact more careful in private.

Why? Both examples illustrate the reasons clearly: for Sociopaths, conditions of conflict of interest and moral hazard are not exceptional. They are normal, everyday situations.  To function effectively they must constantly maintain and improve their position in the ecosystem of other Sociopaths, protecting themselves, competing, forming alliances, trading favors and building trust. Above all they must be wary of Sociopaths with misaligned agendas, and protect themselves in basic ways before attempting things like cooperation. They never lower their masks. In fact they are their masks. There is nothing beneath.

So effective Sociopaths stick with steadfast discipline to the letter of the law, internal and external, because the stupidest way to trip yourself up is in the realm of rules where the Clueless and Losers get to be judges and jury members. What they violate is its spirit, by taking advantage of its ambiguities. Whether this makes them evil or good depends on the situation. That’s a story for another day. Good Sociopaths operate by what they personally choose as a higher morality, in reaction to what they see as the dangers, insanities and stupidities of mob morality. Evil Sociopaths are merely looking for a quick, safe buck. Losers and the Clueless, of course, avoid individual moral decisions altogether.

On how non-sociopaths rarely are able to pull off sociopathic techniques themselves:

So what is going wrong here? Why can’t you learn Sociopath tactics from a book or Wikipedia? It is not that the tactics themselves are misguided, but that their application by non-Sociopaths is usually useless, for three reasons.

The first is that you have to decide what tactics to use and when, based on a real sense of the relative power and alignment of interests with the other party, which the Losers and Clueless typically lack. This real-world information is what makes for tactical surprise. Otherwise your application of even the most subtle textbook tactics can be predicted and easily countered by any Sociopath who has also read the same book. Null information advantage.

The second reason is that tactics make sense only in the context of an entire narrative (including mutual assessments of personality, strengths, weaknesses and history) of a given interpersonal relationship. The Clueless have no sense of narrative rationality, and the Losers are too trapped in their own stories to play to other scripts. Both the Clueless and Losers are too self-absorbed to put in much work developing accurate and usable mental models of others. The result is one-size-fits-all-situations tactical choices which are easily anticipated and deflected.

And the third and most important reason of course, is that your moves have to be backed up by appropriate bets using your table stakes, exposing you to real risks and rewards. A good way to remember this is to think of Powertalk as decisions about what verbal tactics to use when, and with what. The answer to with what is usually a part of your table-stakes. The stuff you are revealing and  risking. If you cannot answer with what? you are posturing. You are not speaking Powertalk. 

I thought this was interesting, particularly on the heels of this recent post about Sherlock Holmes' ability to conceptualize the inner worlds of others. The author has another similar post about constructing narratives in bargaining situations (e.g. "I'm just a poor student, I don't have that kind of money to spend"), locking in the other party to a narrative that favors you ("I appreciate that you are a local business that offers fair prices to loyal customers"), and building upon the narrative until it becomes so convoluted that the other party is not able to keep up with the verbal sparring so the deal must close. It reminded me of these findings that people with more creativity tend to be less moral.

The Gervais Principle (part 1)

Someone sent me a link to the Gervais Principle a long time ago, but it was too long to catch my interest at the time. I kept hearing about it, and someone just recently emailed me again about it, so I decided to actually sit down and read. Essentially it is a theory of how social organizations (specifically businesses, but not exclusively) develop based on the three social roles that people assume -- sociopaths, clueless, losers.

The Sociopath (capitalized) layer comprises the Darwinian/Protestant Ethic will-to-power types who drive an organization to function despite itself. The Clueless layer is what Whyte called the “Organization Man,” but the archetype inhabiting the middle has evolved a good deal since Whyte wrote his book (in the fifties). The Losers are not social losers (as in the opposite of “cool”), but people who have struck bad bargains economically – giving up capitalist striving for steady paychecks.

According to the article, the life cycle of every organization looks like this:

A Sociopath with an idea recruits just enough Losers to kick off the cycle. As it grows it requires a Clueless layer to turn it into a controlled reaction rather than a runaway explosion. Eventually, as value hits diminishing returns, both the Sociopaths and Losers make their exits, and the Clueless start to dominate. Finally, the hollow brittle shell collapses on itself and anything of value is recycled by the sociopaths according to meta-firm logic.

The Sociopaths enter and exit organizations at will, at any stage, and do whatever it takes to come out on top. The contribute creativity in early stages of a organization’s life, neurotic leadership in the middle stages, and cold-bloodedness in the later stages, where they drive decisions like mergers, acquisitions and layoffs that others are too scared or too compassionate to drive.

• The Sociopaths enter and exit organizations at will, at any stage, and do whatever it takes to come out on top. The contribute creativity in early stages of a organization’s life, neurotic leadership in the middle stages, and cold-bloodedness in the later stages, where they drive decisions like mergers, acquisitions and layoffs that others are too scared or too compassionate to drive.
• The Losers like to feel good about their lives. . . . They do have a loyalty to individual people, and a commitment to finding fulfillment through work when they can, and coasting when they cannot.
• The Clueless are the ones who lack the competence to circulate freely through the economy (unlike Sociopaths and Losers), and build up a perverse sense of loyalty to the firm, even when events make it abundantly clear that the firm is not loyal to them. To sustain themselves, they must be capable of fashioning elaborate delusions based on idealized notions of the firm — the perfectly pathological entities we mentioned. 

The Gervais principle:

• Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves.

The entire article is interesting but most relevant for this audience probably is the description of the career of the sociopath:

The future Sociopath must be an under-performer at the bottom. Like the average Loser, he recognizes that the bargain is a really bad one. Unlike the risk-averse loser though, he does not try to make the best of a bad situation by doing enough to get by. He has no intention of just getting by. He very quickly figures out — through experiments and fast failures — that the Loser game is not worth becoming good at. He then severely under-performs in order to free up energy to concentrate on maneuvering an upward exit. He knows his under-performance is not sustainable, but he has no intention of becoming a lifetime-Loser employee anyway. He takes the calculated risk that he’ll find a way up before he is fired for incompetence.

It reminds me of my own experiences being fired from jobs in which, although I was generously compensated compared to a lot of jobs I could have been doing, it was clear to me that my role was to be a worker slave for others to profit off and I had other plans.

There were also very interesting discussions of the clueless, particularly the amazing feats of self-deception required for them to continue their arbitrary and ambiguous roles, the perfect position for a narcissist.

Machiavelli for dummies

Power is a sociopath's drug. It's his very reason for living. It's no wonder sociopaths are attracted to positions of power in business, politics, criminal cartels, etc. And who better to learn it from than medieval power brokers like Machiavelli. Here are some comments on Machiavelli's philosophies and their role in the business world, courtesy of Forbes.

It's good cautionary advice for anyone, particularly for minorities like sociopaths who are vulnerable to attack.

[M]isjudging your relationship with powerful people can jeopardize your career, your health and your bank balance. Open any newspaper and you will find the stories of those who abused their power and those who became their victims.

And why we should accept our sociopath selves:

The key to effective leadership is self-knowledge and self-acceptance. This is not what most people imagine when they think of Machiavelli. But men like Borgia were destroyed precisely because they lacked self-knowledge. Had Borgia recognized his weaknesses, he would have taken a different path. But only strong people can acknowledge their weaknesses.

Self-acceptance is equally important. Once we accept our imperfections, they lose their power and others cannot use them to manipulate us. We find the courage needed to speak the truth to power. And we find it easier to accept the imperfections in others. Whether we lead or follow, self-knowledge and self-acceptance are indispensable.

And parting thoughts:

Machiavelli teaches us to take responsibility for our relationship with power. This is not obligatory, of course, but merely wise. Understanding Machiavelli gives us a richer appreciation for human nature. It allows us to foresee problems, defuse dangerous situations and make wiser decisions.

Are corporations sociopathic?

Is the corporation a sociopath writ large? The makers of the documentary The Corporation certainly think so. Let's make a quick diagnosis. Does the corporation have a flexible identity? Yes, corporations spend untold millions on P.R. alone, crafting whatever image is required to dupe the public into thinking they’re ‘nice.’ Does the corporation love to play games? Yes, corporations exist to play the game of ‘let’s make as much money as we can.’ Ruthlessness is very often another name of for that same game. Does the corporation sometimes behave irresponsibly? Yup, when it pollutes to cut costs without regard for any potential harm it might bring, for instance. Does the corporation respect social and moral norms? Nope, the corporation can and many times does do whatever is necessary to make a profit, and paying hefty fines is often seen as just the price of doing business. Most importantly, does the corporation lack a conscience? Yes, corporations not only lack conscience, but often never admit to any ‘wrong doing’ whatsoever, even when they are found guilty by a court of law.

Okay, so maybe the corporation is sociopathic in nature. BUT… as always things are more complicated than moralistic anti-corporate anti-globalization anti-western westerners believe. The corporation provides jobs for billions of people all over the world who only want to take care of their families and themselves in peace. Even sweatshops provide employment in impoverished locales where there would otherwise be none. The corporation has played a pivotal role in creating a dominant western economy, one that has been an engine for prosperity for the middle as well as the upper classes and the envy of the world. And the corporation has been a leveler of the playing field, allowing some from historically disadvantaged backgrounds to rise through the ranks to become leaders. The corporation has spread invention, spurred innovation and expanded industry all over the globe, for worse yes, but also for better.

Are corporations evil? Are sociopaths? Or does the question itself arise from a naïve and simplistic mindset to begin with?

Oliver North

I have always thought that Oliver North was an interesting character in history, so I was pleased to see him featured in the book "Power" as a positive example:

In November 1986, U.S. Marine Corps Lt. Colonel Oliver North was fired by President Ronald Reagan from his position at the National Security Council for his involvement in the Iran-contra scandal. Iran-contra involved selling weapons, via intermediaries, to Iran and using the funds from these sales to finance the Nicaraguan resistance then trying to overthrow a left-leaning government. After testifying before Congress in the summer of 1987, North was indicted the following year on 16 felony counts, including accepting illegal gratuities, aiding and abetting the obstruction of a congressional inquiry, and destroying documents and evidence. Although he was convicted on three counts, his conviction was overturned on appeal on the basis that jurors had been influenced by the congressional hearings, during which he had been granted immunity for his testimony. During the nationally televised hearings, North admitted that he had shredded documents, lied to Congress, and violated, or at least come exceedingly close to violating, a law prohibiting giving aid to the Nicaraguan resistance.

But Oliver North knew how to act and speak with power. These abilities would produce an amazing effect on his reputation and his subsequent career. North defended himself and his actions by appealing to a higher purpose—protecting American interests, saving American lives, protecting important U.S. intelligence secrets, following the orders of his superiors, and doing what he was told to do as a good Marine lieutenant colonel—in short, being a good soldier. North wore his ribbon-decorated uniform to the hearings, even though he was seldom if ever in uniform at his job at the NSC. He took responsibility for what he did, saying that he was “not embarrassed” about his actions or about appearing to explain them. And he asserted that he had controlled what had occurred, frequently using phrases such as “I told” and “I caused.” This phrasing demonstrated that he was not running away from what he had done. Observers watching people who don’t deny or run away from their actions naturally presume that the perpetrators don’t feel guilty or ashamed, so maybe no one should be too upset. This phrasing also communicated power, that North was in charge rather than a “victim” of circumstance.

Only seven years after this incident, using the celebrity and sympathy that his testimony created, Oliver North ran for the U.S. Senate from Virginia and lost by just 3 percent of the vote to the incumbent, Charles Robb. During that campaign, North raised some $16 million through direct-mail solicitations, making him the top recipient of direct-mail political funds in the United States that year. Today, North, author of several books, is a television commentator on Fox News and a well-paid speaker at both public and private organizations. And even at the time of the hearings, he enjoyed a positive image. The Wall Street Journal asked dozens of senior U.S. executives if they would hire Oliver North. “The majority said they would…. A poll of the general public reflected the bullishness on Col. North…56 percent of those surveyed said they would hire Col. North; 35 percent said they wouldn’t hire him and 9 percent weren’t sure.”1

Donald Kennedy, a biology professor and former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, served as president of Stanford University. Kennedy got caught up in a scandal over indirect costs in the early 1990s. Because it is impossible to associate all the costs of running any organization, for instance, the water and power, police and fire protection, and infrastructure such as libraries, with specific research projects, research grants have an overhead rate that reflects these costs. That rate is then charged to the government for all contracts. In the case of Stanford and other research universities, the claim was that unallowable charges, for instance, for lobbying, liquor, a yacht used by the sailing club, silverware and furniture for the president’s house, and other items, had been included in the cost pools used for calculating the overhead rate.2 After several years of investigation, litigation, and audits, the government found no basis for its claim. Stanford agreed to pay just $1.2 million to the government for overcharges for over 18,000 research grants covering the fiscal years from 1981 to 1992 that involved hundreds of millions of dollars in total funds.3

After the brouhaha broke, Kennedy, like North, appeared before a congressional investigating committee. Donald Kennedy’s performance could not have been more different from North’s. North appeared at the witness stand with just his attorney. Kennedy came with a team that included the head of government contracts from the accounting firm Arthur Andersen, the controller and assistant controller from the university, and the chairman of the board of trustees, James Gaither. This coterie of colleagues conveyed the image that Kennedy could not answer the questions on his own. Using long, convoluted sentences full of subordinate clauses, answering questions indirectly, admitting that he was “embarrassed,” and looking extremely uncomfortable, Kennedy made a weak impression—he looked guilty. He left his position as Stanford president soon thereafter.

The differences between Oliver North’s and Donald Kennedy’s presentations may have had little to do with personality or individual style. Kennedy was not only a distinguished scientist but a successful and effective teacher; he had testified in front of Congress numerous times before, and many people watching his testimony who knew him say he seemed like a different person. He came to the hearings prepared, as did North. What differed was how they chose to present themselves, how they decided to act, and the impression they made. Kennedy wanted to express contrition; North chose to convey incredulity—how could he be questioned?—and some righteous anger. As we will see later in this chapter, expressing anger is usually much more effective than expressing sadness, guilt, or remorse in being seen as powerful.

We choose how we will act and talk, and those decisions are consequential for acquiring and holding on to power.

I think the sociopath has a natural advantage in acting without shame, because we don't react the same way to other people's sense of moral outrage.  Not that sociopaths have the monopoly on shamelessness, but I do think it is one of our more potent weapons in getting away with things and getting what we want.

Beating the market by trading like a sociopath (part 2)

Predators tend to see in black and white.  Scientists have suggested that contrast against background may be more helpful for predators in detecting potential prey than color, helping them to focus on crucial spatial relationships rather than extraneous details.  I’m color-blind to mass hysteria.  My lack of empathy means I don’t get caught up in other people’s panic, particularly mass panic.  It gives me an incredibly unique perspective.  And in the financial world, being able to think opposite the pack is all you need.

Traders laud the “contrarian” mentality.  Warren Buffett famously said “Be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy.”  Easier said than done for the vast majority of stock traders.  And when I’m trading stocks, those are the people I am up against.  On every stock trade there is someone who wants to sell and someone who wants to buy, at least at a particular price.  Both tend to think the other is an idiot.  In simple terms, the person who is selling thinks that she is getting out just in time while the person buying thinks that they are about to make good money.

Because the actual transaction is faceless, I can’t practice my usual people-reading skills or manipulation, but I don’t need to.  I understand mass psychology.  And the truth is that the market doesn’t really reflect some magical perfect valuation of a stock under the efficient market hypothesis.  It reflects the mass consensus of how actual individual investors value the stock.  It is the sum total of everyone’s hopes and fears about what a company is capable of doing.  Preying on people’s hopes and fears is my métier, even en masse.  To my colorblind eyes, I see these features more starkly than anything else.

Given a choice of hopes and fears, preying on people’s fears is the better bet by far.  Hope is too ethereal.  People are too unpredictable when acting on hope.  I’d rather rely on their fear, but even that is tricky.  When the market spooks, it can be as senselessly destructive and difficult to exploit as a stampede.  When I trade stocks the main thing I am focused on is not people’s fear of losing what they have, but fear of losing out—of having missed an opportunity to make millions.  I look for stocks that have the visceral pull of get-rich-quick schemes.

Beating the market by trading like a sociopath (part 1)

I love money.  It’s so impersonal.  In a world where winning is the best thing, money is frequently how I keep score.  I don’t like spending it, necessarily.  Money doesn’t matter to me in itself.  I only like it because other people care about it a lot (more than almost anything else in the world).  Because they care about it so much, they will fight hard for it—against me or anybody else.  It makes the game very fun.  And although it is never high stakes on my part, it almost always is with whomever I am playing against.  I play because it’s a game.  Others play because it’s their life.  People are frequently ruined.

I have an incredibly green thumb for money.  I fully funded my retirement by the time I was 30 years old.  Since I started investing seriously in 2004, I have averaged a 9.5% return in the stock market—257% better than the average returns of the S&P 500 over the same period of 3.7%.  It’s sick how well I do trading stocks.  Beating the market this soundly and consistently is unheard of and many argue it is impossible (or due solely to luck).  In 2011, only 4 out of 5 mutual fund managers beat the market, and only a handful of individuals have managed to do so with any regularity. One Forbes article (“Why Smart People Fail to Beat the Market") put it this way “There are only two ways to beat the stock market in the long-term, net of expenses: one, trade on superior information; two, be lucky.” (Unfortunately, the efficient market hypothesis holds that all available information about a company’s future prospects are already widely known and reflected in the price of a stock,  so that just leaves one way to beat the market.  The one exception is so-called insider information, which is largely illegal to trade upon.).

But I am not trading on better knowledge.  I am a relatively unsophisticated investor.  Instead, I am trading on a special vision.

Managing expectations

For several years I was in a very corporate environment (until I got fired for shirking almost all work assignments).  My bosses would always admonish us to manage our clients' expectations.  By that they meant that we should under-promise so we would look like the hero when we exceeded expectations, or at the very least always meet their expectations.  This was an ok strategy most of the time, particularly when there was some information asymmetry between you and the client that made it difficult for the client to assess for itself the likely outcomes from your type of services.  In situations where the client is not clueless and can actually make an educated guess itself about what you should and shouldn't be able to accomplish, this can be a self-defeating strategy.  If they know from their own experiences that they can expect x quality at y price, when they come into your office and you tell them that you can only provide (x-10) at (y+1000) price, they'll just look elsewhere for services.

As part of my current job, I often give training presentations or workshops, either in-house or for other organizations or conferences.  I just started one in-house presentation yesterday -- a multi-week affair that most people have to attend because it looks good for promotion.  I have done this particular series before and found that most people's complaints revolved around it being too much work.  It also was too much work for me.  This time around I've revamped it to be the sort of thing that people (including me) can just show up to and have an interesting discussion.  But there is always the worry that people will not take it seriously at all, and then things will truly fall apart before the end of the series with possible damage to my reputation from people thinking that I am a "joke" or can otherwise be taken advantage of.  My plan of action (a risky plan of action) is to have the class be easy but to maintain appearances is to be seen as an authority such that they are afraid of my judgment, and also highlight the accomplishments and good ideas of their colleagues to foment peer pressure.  This way they will feel both vertical and horizontal pressure to put forth their better efforts, despite the casual structure of the class.

To establish myself as an authority, I told them that I chose this particular topic because it is something that I didn't know much about but wanted to learn.  I then told a story about someone famous in my field who happens to be in his 80s, and how he does a similar series with an emphasis on technology because that's the only way he can keep up with the latest and still remain relevant.  Still, I really played up my ignorance, turning to particular articles written by experts and saying I don't even know what they're talking about, and could someone get more esoteric?  I then proceeded to lead the discussion by asking insightful questions that I knew would be some people's specialities or at least a handful of people would know because of current events.  I stirred up this almost feeding frenzy of bragging, everyone eager to try to show off their own knowledge and expertise lest they be thought the lone idiot in the seminar, but I never let anyone get too comfortable either.  Finally at the end I take them along a particular polished thought experiment that blew their minds.  The truth is that although I am not an authority in this general subject area, I am in the particular subject matter we discussed this week and will discuss next week.  So now I've basically told them I'm an ignorant dilettante... who can also blow their minds.  If my plan has worked correctly, the thing they should be asking themselves today is -- if I think I'm an idiot at something in which I am so far above them, how good am I at the things that I would actually admit expertise?

Managing mental illness

This is an interesting NY Times article about managing Schizoaffective disorder that questions the typical advice of taking it easy. Particularly, it suggests that people with that particular disorder do better when they have a very busy, demanding job or otherwise keep busy with obligations:

She travels a lot to conferences, and when she is back in California she keeps her schedule as full as possible. Her mind runs on high, and without fuel — without work — it seems to want to feed on itself. Her elbows usually tingle when that is about to happen, she said, and she will often play number games in her head. If she needs to, she will make a quick phone call.

I remember being happiest in my childhood during the school year. Once the summer came around, it was very easy for me to get cripplingly bored and generally dissatisfied with life. When I was a teenager, I would actually have symptoms of depression in the summer--feelings of malaise and general mental unrest that would always quickly disappear once school started again. During the school years I had every hour of my life scheduled because I liked it that way. One time I got appendicitis and went for 10 days with it perforated without seeking medical attention--I just had so many things I was caught up with. Right now I am in a similar situation of possibly overdoing it. I'm sleep deprived and may be developing an ulcer, but at least my mind isn't eating itself.

The corporate sociopath

From the Boston Globe's short excerpt/review of Babiak, P. et al., “Corporate Psychopathy: Talking the Walk,” Behavioral Sciences & the Law (March/April 2010):

Watching the news some days, you’d think a lot of companies were run by psychopaths. And, according to a recent study, some might well be. One of the authors of the study was hired by companies to evaluate managers — mostly middle-aged, college-educated, white males — for a management development program. It turns out that these managers scored higher on measures of psychopathy than the overall population, and some who had very high scores were candidates for, or held, senior positions. In general, managers with higher scores were seen as better communicators, better strategic thinkers, and more creative. However, they were also seen as having poor management style, not being team players, and delivering poor performance. But, apparently, this didn’t prevent some of them from being seen as having leadership potential. The authors conclude that “the very skills that make the psychopath so unpleasant (and sometimes abusive) in society can facilitate a career in business even in the face of negative performance ratings.”

Does this mean that there is something right about sociopaths, or that there is something wrong about business?