… assholes can be successful.
I wince at such language, intentionally used as it is by brilliant Bob Sutton who adds however, "Even if you are a successful asshole, you are still an asshole and I don't want to be around you."
Sutton is the author of The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t. No lightweight to publically comment on this long avoided view on Jobs, Sutton is author of Weird Ideas That Work: Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation (Free Press, 2002) and co-author (with Jeffrey Pfeffer) of both The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Firms Turn Knowledge Into Action (Harvard Business School Press, 2000 and of Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management (Harvard Business School Press, 2006).
Ben Casnocha ruminates, “Why do assholes succeed? Does their brilliance make up for it? Do they just get lucky? Do people not care about likability as much as we think?"
Yet, assholes can unite the people around them. Perhaps we grow closer in reaction to a common enemy. “Having somebody who is really difficult can actually be good for the workplace,” said Jo-Ellen Pozner, a researcher in the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern in the New York Times. “If everyone really hates this one person, it becomes the basis of social bonding for the rest of the group.”
See Sutton's video.
