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No Brilliant Jerks

leadershipnow.com

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Re: No Brilliant Jerks

#61

Post by csours »

blfr wrote: post #4

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 a…

> 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?

Re: No Brilliant Jerks

#63

Post by snovv_crash »

keenmaster wrote: post #34
minitech wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you don't want brilliant jerks, you are inherently negating their brilliance. ??¹ > 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. ???² ¹ Valuing non-jerkiness more isn’t “negating brilliance”. Brilliant non-jerks are available. ² Er, no.

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…

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.

Re: No Brilliant Jerks

#64

Post by snovv_crash »

chris_wot wrote: post #49
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #48

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…

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 w…

> Also: you had better not be wrong in your disruption.

This. Measure 10x and cut once, because if your cut is wrong you've inconvenienced a lot more people than yourself.

Re: No Brilliant Jerks

#65

Post by keenmaster »

snovv_crash wrote: post #63
keenmaster wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: No Brilliant Jerks

#66

Post by thu2111 »

akudha wrote: post #15
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #2

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. It's way more durable.

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 lif…

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.

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