I haven't been able to get this idea out of my mind that to be a successful CEO, you need to be a sociopath. Somehow it feels like decent people with decent products just don't make it.
I think this is what Nietzche calls the master and slave morality. Basically, generations of slaves, or peasants, or whatever, develop a morality that is fit for purpose for the life of a slave. Slaves care about things like loyalty, keeping your word, not being a squeaky wheel, honesty, and all that because those traits are adaptive for living and working together with a with a bunch of peers.<p>Conversely, the master morality is adapted to being a master. A King may lie in diplomacy and betray allies and that kind of thing would be horrible in a peasant, but the King's actions might make his entire country better off and in a utilitarian sense that values only the King's countrymen - it may make everyone better off. But regardless of who is made better off by it the masters, like the peasants, have developed their own sense of morality, closer to ends justifying the means, because it is adaptive for them.<p>Names like "Master" and "Slave" make it seem like the master morality is the good morality or that the slave morality is bad. But I think those are just value judgments that come from the words. Nietzche says (to my understanding) that the truly noble person must move beyond either the master or slave morality and do what is actually right based on his own understanding and without regarding for the folk traditions of either class of master or slave morality.<p>Ultimately, what I'm trying to get at is it may be the case that your morality is adapted to being a worker-bee and the CEO's morality is adapted to being a CEO and so what the CEO does can seem sociopathic because the CEO is actually playing by a different set of rules or with different goals in mind.
Ethical systems all have 'don't make waves' built into them. Everyone who horns into a crowded market or even a greenfield is in some psychological sense a rule breaker. Competition and strategy are psychologically hard if you view your competitor as the in-group
I am literally writing a pitch deck right now (just for fun). My solution statement includes stuff like "respecting the user - no tracking, no selling data, no dark patterns"... deep down I doubt any investor would even look at this and would laugh at the naivety.<p>They would look at FB, Reddit and others and, naturally, want a piece of that pie.<p>Unfortunately, I think the better way to get funding would be to say:<p>* this is how we can capture as much data from the user as possible while convincing the user it is good for them<p>* this is how we can sell it to the highest bidder<p>* this is how we can make the user an addict
Every CEOs I’ve met are super nice people; and they seem genuine about it.<p>I think it’a a trait that’s actually needed. Genuily nice + smart + perseverance will get you far.
Only a Sith deals in absolutes, but I do think the odds of success are tilted in favour of greedy manipulative liars and against kind, honest, decent folk. We used to have religion to convince people that it was OK because the rich were getting the short end of the stick in eternity, but now it's just sad.<p>The best people I know are nurses getting paid pennies to keep people alive. The world sucks. Sorry.
To be or to become. Very soon I will dismiss somebody for first time in my life, I feel very sorry on personal level, but every day I am detaching my emotions more and more from that decision. Its business, it is what it is.
I think to be a successful CEO or founder you have to be able to distinguish business and personal relationships and actions. This is exceptionally hard to do, especially if you are a subordinate.
Because they <i>are</i> more likely to have psychopathic traits than the general population, but much less so than criminals. But not really enough to worry about. The vast majority of psychopaths are in prison and regular jobs. And the vast majority of CEOs display no psychopathic tendencies.<p>"Roughly 4% to as high as 12% of CEOs exhibit psychopathic traits, according to some expert estimates, many times more than the 1% rate found in the general population and more in line with the 15% rate found in prisons. "<p><a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-psychopathic-ceo/?sh=8247122791e3" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-p...</a><p><a href="https://hbr.org/2004/10/executive-psychopaths" rel="nofollow">https://hbr.org/2004/10/executive-psychopaths</a><p><a href="https://psychopathyis.org/stats/" rel="nofollow">https://psychopathyis.org/stats/</a><p>The key aspect of CEOs that make for success is aligning people with vision and some measure of bravery to eschew "traditional" and "safe" to pursue that vision. That can be either because you are a master manipulator and driven by ego-mania, or because you are genuine and compelling and understand your industry, or both.<p>Physiologically, you should try to be tall, good looking, outgoing, confident, somewhat narcissistic, and infected with Toxoplasmosis.<p><a href="http://www.sci-news.com/medicine/toxoplasmosis-entrepreneurial-activities-06249.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.sci-news.com/medicine/toxoplasmosis-entrepreneuri...</a>
I don’t agree. We need more people to support positive sum game rules than zero sum game rules.
Keep your values high and find the right people (investors) who side with you.
Definitely not! If you act like a jerk it's not like that goes unnoticed either. Wouldn't you rather do business with companies that seem like they're generally trying to be helpful? Stripe is a good example. YC is a good example.<p>Frankly there is a shortage of companies like this, thats part of why you may feel this way.<p>This shortage makes it more valuable to operate with integrity.<p>Also it's just a much more fun way to live. What else are you going to do? Go around screwing people over all the time? At the end of the day you still have to live with yourself.<p>If you're looking for examples of this mindset I recommend reading Feynmann[0][1], How I Became The Honest Broker[2], and Various Diatribes from old hacker culture[3].<p>It's possible to play extremely hard and not be an asshole. It's called good sportsmanship. It's not required but it's entirely possible.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Surely-Feynman-Adventures-Curious-Character/dp/0393316041" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Surely-Feynman-Adventures-Curious-Cha...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.amazon.com/What-Care-Other-People-Think/dp/0393320928" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/What-Care-Other-People-Think/dp/03933...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/how-i-became-the-honest-broker" rel="nofollow">https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/how-i-became-the-honest-brok...</a><p>[3] <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html</a>
I used to work in executive training and have worked with many CEOs of large orgs - to get to the top, for the most part, you have to be incredibly empathetic.<p>You also have to be incredibly outcome-oriented. You need to prioritize a range of objectives against a mountain of constraints. Sometimes that means deprioritizing parts of a product or company mission to further the longterm success of the business, using the information you have. If they didn’t, then they wouldn’t be doing their job. Sometimes that also means deprioritizing people. This is why every leader will always be able to be portrayed as a sociopath.<p>The actual sociopaths are one or two levels beneath - those that are jockeying for good standing by pushing themselves up and others down. They rarely make it to the top and if they do, aren’t there for long.<p>In my experience, those who do not see this tend to hold different levels of either empathy or outcome-orientation.
Paul Graham advises otherwise:<p><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html</a><p><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/safe.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/safe.html</a><p><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/mean.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/mean.html</a><p>Here's a VC, whose main driving force is the rate of company growth, telling people that they benefit from being nicer.<p>I believe Sturgeon's Law applies to companies as well. The average programmer is pretty incompetent and paid terribly, but often not within our social groups. Most CEOs you have access to would probably not be hired by a good company; the good ones are likely outside our social circle.
Contrarian proposition here:<p>The idea that only sociopaths succeed is an artefact of what we observe. And what we observe is driven by which narratives get turned into stories about business success, into hagiographies about politicians and businesspeople, and into folklore.<p>Everyone wants to talk about what a horrible person Steve Jobs was, nobody wants to talk about any of the tens of thousands of multi-millionaires who are running decent businesses, and who may not be saintly figures, but they aren't asking new hires to sign away their right to a bathroom break, either.<p>There's a really fantastic book I recommend everyone read about success, it was popular a couple of decades ago:<p>The Millionaire Next Door: <a href="http://www.thomasjstanley.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.thomasjstanley.com</a><p>It was recommended to me by a man who was a centi-millionaire at the time. He owned one car, a Volvo Estate, and his partner would drive him to the commuter train to his office in a building he owned and where he could easily have as many parking spaces as he wanted.<p>He was driven and very successful. I asked him if the money changed anything. He told me:<p>"Yes. We used to drive to [Grateful] Dead concerts and camp. Now we can afford to fly, and even take our friends."<p>The message of the book is that the reality of moderately wealthy people and business owners is very, very different from what sells copies of business magazines.<p>I believe that very strongly to this exact day. Also, I work for a CEO is is not a complete sociopath, so I'm up to n=2 for my experience.
You need to be kind to everyone else and yourself. Go make things happen with gentleness<p>Collaboratively Efficient Operators?<p>Treat contempt with disdain and help people learn to work together<p>Speak the truth you know and others accept. Use your intelligence to learn the wit of many. Let agreement build on argued decisions.<p>Don't rush<p>Read loads of Philosophy, we have loads of it and it's very common<p>Bowing to people is a good technique if sincere. Respect is a great way to begin a conversation<p>Delegate only that which you understand. This is difficult. Concentrate on the purpose of the responsibility<p>Consider everything else before yourself and then revel in your self<p>Don't be a sociopath
I think you are looking at it from a negative/pessimistic perspective.<p>Another way to look at it is that most CEOs are optimists.<p><a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2012/11/15/optimists-become-ceos-study-finds/?sh=6e469ecd7f53" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2012/11/15/optimists...</a>
You might be buying into a sociopathic definition of "success". If your definition of success is to be #1 in the market, focused on profits over everything else, and have no non-work criteria for success, then yes, being a sociopath helps.<p>But if you define success by happiness, life satisfaction, family and friends, enjoying your work, and fulfilling your personal goals. That can be done more readily without going sociopathic.
This is kind of a loaded question/ statement.<p>> "Why do I feel like you need to be a sociopath to succeed?"<p>ok, you hooked me... lets see what you're talking about<p>> "to be a successful CEO"<p>Oh, well thats really only one very niche version of success. I personally can only think of a handful of CEOs that I consider "successful." They're really just managers, and we happen to be at a point in American history where they are very well compensated... historically this has not really been the case. Conservative (small c) argument: Name 5 successful CEOs from the 1930s. Now name 5 Successful Authors, Actors, Politicians, etc.<p>> "to be a successful CEO, you need to be a sociopath"<p>I would probably rephrase this as to be a successful CEO you need to be an "opportunist". Sociopathy is a mental illness that seems related to what you seem to be implying, but "sociopathy" exclusively is a bit narrow of a definition. If we were to say "all corporate managers are sociopaths" that would be very very prevalent.<p>> "Somehow it feels like decent people with decent products just don't make it."<p>I feel like you need more evidence to support this claim, and a more specific thesis. As an example per "The millionaire Next Door" most high net-worth individuals are just hardworking business owners that invest in income producing assets, and don't spend a lot. CEOs rarely make products unless they are a founder that becomes the CEO. CEOs as a group are corporate managers, and they usually become corporate managers by being trained to be corporate managers.<p>I personally don't agree with this take either. Too much anecdotal evidence on my side. CEOs, like the rest of the population have shortcomings, quirks, mental illnesses, etc. Thats just humanity.
Because that's the correct intuition. The contemporary world is not designed for sane people. All the systems around us are designed to alienate people from each other with artificial intermediators like money, status, fame, and just generally useless toys and gadgets. To succeed in such a world you have to have sociopathic tendencies. You have to value material goods and possessions over people which is kinda insane when you really think about it.<p>There is an interesting interview with Brit Marling addressing some of these points about her time working at a bank (Goldman Sachs): <a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=brit+marling+goldman+sachs&t=ffab&atb=v228-1&iar=videos&iax=videos&ia=videos&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dt6ZMaBAlgwM" rel="nofollow">https://duckduckgo.com/?q=brit+marling+goldman+sachs&t=ffab&...</a>.
Hot take but sociopathy is technically the compulsively violent one. People think it’s “social psychopath” but sociopath implies physical violence. Psychopaths are what you’re thinking of. Not always violent, but always charming.
Sure, their job is non-grinding and non-STEM so they have tons of leeway in "corporate relations". They can afford to ride the wide margins of behavior their position provides, and game the system.<p>Meanwhile sociopath engineer means you hate giving yourself to a group of people, and knowing your place.<p>That's fine because in the end, a week without a CEO <i>may</i> be damaging. A week without production is catastrophic. So when the rubber hits the road, it's the happy down-to-earth worker bees that produce the value the managers play around with.
How do you cultivate sociopathy?<p>I took a personality disorder quiz and scored high on everything except the dark triad.<p>Because of that quiz score, I’m worried that my earning potential is not as high as it could be if I was otherwise a high functioning psychopath.<p>I’m totally serious btw, any tips are appreciated.
Considering Maslow's Hierarchy, one falls short of ascribing "success" to being a sociopath.<p>Tend toward sobriety, debtlessness, marriage, and connection to a community of faith for joyous results.
I was a pretty successful CEO once, and I don't think I'm a sociopath. However, the chair of my board was pretty sociopathic. (Yes, serious).
because it really helps, particularly for spectacular success, which is held up perpetually in front of our faces by the media, which also appears to be filled with sociopaths<p>in the bible, the devil had the power to offer Christ all power and riches of this world, which Christ refused<p>i think about that a lot
<i>decent people with decent products just don't make it.</i><p>Which is why you need to make your product a little more than decent. "Evil
will always triumph because good is dumb." So be less dumb, and you can
stay just as good.