Hi Kemble! OT OT I found this interesting. Certainly Michael's management style is not like this. To me, this is a total contrast. Where is character and integrity? What would Bill Bennett say about these personality traits? :)Leigh
nytimes.com
January 30, 2000
Traits Only a Boss Could Love
Issue in Depth
The New York Times: Your Money
Forum By RACHEL-LEHMANN-HAUPT
To Michael Maccoby, anthropologist, psychoanalyst and scholar of management, executives like Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Jeffrey P. Bezos exemplify a new personality type that now dominates our business culture: "the productive narcissist."
In "Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons," an article in the January-February issue of the Harvard Business Review, Maccoby asserted that such business leaders displayed creative vision, a willingness to break the rules and an ability to persuade people to follow them. But, he said, they are terrible listeners, hypersensitive to criticism and lacking in empathy. All of that, he added, can make them tough to work for.
Maccoby, former director of the technology, public policy and human development program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, advises underlings to display great empathy for such bosses' feelings, to understand their vulnerabilities and to always give them credit for the employees' own ideas.
Maccoby, who has studied workplace personalities and strategies for 30 years, was once an associate of Erich Fromm, the famed psychoanalyst. Together, they wrote "Social Character in a Mexican Village"(Prentice-Hall, 1970).
In the late 1960s, Maccoby, then at Stanford, visited companies like Hewlett-Packard and IBM to study people who create technology. Rejecting the stereotype of William H. Whyte's "Organization Man," he found instead the Gamesman, who took calculated risks and tried new methods while making sure to please the boss.
In "The Gamesman: The New Corporate Leader" (Simon & Schuster, 1977), Maccoby defined him this way: "He sees a developing project, human relations and his own career in terms of options and as if they were a game."
Now that entrenched companies face much faster-moving competitors, he says, leaders must take bolder steps and remain obsessive about their visions. "The Gamesman figured out how to win," he wrote in his recent article. "The Jeff Bezoses, the Bill Gateses and the Steve Cases are creating a new game."
(None of these executives, at Amazon.com, Microsoft and America Online, had any comment. Ellison, at Oracle, was not available.
The new business leaders have a great deal of aggression, Maccoby said in an interview. They can become too isolated, because they are so independent, often not asking for advice. "It's a difficult personality type," he says. "But the best ones have a sense of humor."
Maccoby, whose Washington consulting firm bears his name, advises employees that such a boss often has sharp intuition, and that anyone challenging it must be well prepared. "They're willing to listen if someone has a real argument, but when you say, 'Boss, that doesn't feel right,' they get very angry."
He also tells employees to hone time-management skills and to learn what demands are truly worth heeding. "Narcissistic leaders often give subordinates many more orders than they can possibly execute," he said. "Ignore the requests he makes that don't make sense. Forget about them. He will."
A boss lucky enough to recognize these traits in himself or herself should find a trusted sidekick. "But underlings have to be able to reinforce their best side without looking like a sycophant," Maccoby said. He offered the example of Gates and Steven Ballmer, recently named chief executive at Microsoft: "Ballmer brings in the ability to help make Gates' vision a reality in a much more organized way."
As more women gain power in business, he said, it will become clear that they are as prone as men to becoming productive narcissists.
Since Maccoby's article appeared, a forum on the Harvard Business Review Web site has been buzzing. "I've worked for a very unproductive narcissist," wrote Hugh Williams, a data warehousing consultant, explaining that some condescending remarks a boss made during a meeting "cost our company millions in a sale lost."
But Noel M. Tichy, a professor of organizational behavior at the University of Michigan's business school, called Maccoby's work unscholarly. "I think it's an irresponsible article that labels people without proper empirical data," Tichy said in an interview. "He hasn't met half of these people. He just picked a sexy label and put a negative spin on what all leaders should be doing."
Maccoby responded that the people he writes about are so well known that meeting them isn't necessary. "He's talking about a very narrow model of research," Maccoby said. "These are people in the public domain."
Maccoby says he has received notes from chief executives recognizing these traits in themselves and asking to get into psychoanalysis. One chief that he classified as a productive narcissist wrote to say he was hurt that Maccoby only alluded to him, and didn't name him, in the article.
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