KEY POINTS:
Do you have to be a selfish, greedy, overbearing, bullying tyrant to succeed in business? Many would answer "yes" - rueful witnesses to the fact that in business, as in baboon troops, alpha males (and females) end up on top, where the combination of success, domineering natures and
fawning underlings quickly turns them into horrible creeps.
This is why business has a disproportionate share of the world's supply of such people - Worldcom's Kozlowski and Ebbers, downsizing king "Chainsaw Al" Dunlap, Donald Trump, ousted Disney head Michael Eisner and much of the top management at Enron.
In Britain, maybe only Robert Maxwell would make the A-list, but the country could supply a richly unpleasant supporting cast, including many trading managers in the City of London.
But as Bob Sutton notes in his entertaining and important book The No Asshole Rule (Sphere), succeeding in business is not the same as having a successful business.
Without careful management, the abrasive qualities the unscrupulous use to elbow others out of their way as they move up can - and often do - tear the fabric of the organisation to bits.
The bullyboys may succeed, but they often wreck the business in doing so.
This forceful plea by Sutton - management professor at Stanford and co-author of Hard Facts, Dangerous Half Truths and Total Nonsense - for workplace civility is founded on a mass of psychological and management research demonstrating that the idea of "the brilliant bastard", the star who is also a totally unpleasant person, is, organisationally speaking, an oxymoron.
In terms of hard cash, one business estimated only the most obvious management, legal and HR costs of dealing with an "untouchable" but obnoxious performer at $160,000 a year.
Adding in the indirect losses to the firm through stress, demotivation, absenteeism and knock-on effects for customers takes the total even higher.
But more cheerfully, the cost of getting rid of Mr or Ms Poison is often more than offset by the positive effects - freer flow of ideas, fewer staff leaving, better morale and more time to spend on customers rather than on staying alive.
There are, Sutton admits, one or two exceptions to the "no assholes rule". Managers sometimes need to do "bad cop" as well as "good cop", not least when they're dealing with the clueless, spiteful and lazy.
In some people it's hard to tell whether good or bad cop predominates. When he googled "Steve Jobs", Apple's mercurial chief, with "asshole", Sutton got 89,000 hits compared with only 750 for Oracle's equally notorious Larry Ellison. Jobs is undeniably both brilliant and impossible, capable of making underlings believe he is either the devil or a hero. But research shows that fear motivates less well than positive reward.
Playing the tyrant, Sutton concludes, is a dangerous game, the most likely outcome of which is that you are one, in which case you'll almost certainly do far more harm than good.
This is because human emotions, including fear, contempt and rage, are contagious, but , personality has little influence on how people behave in particular circumstances. Negative interactions have five times more effect on mood than positive ones.
The upshot is that corporate hoodlums breed like rabbits.
Worse, if the plague isn't stifled at birth, it can kick off a vicious circle in which tyrannical behaviour becomes institutionalised, generating expectations that reinforce it. Managers who rule by fear and loathing foster cynicism, resistance and indifferent performance that seem to justify yet another turn of the screw.
In some areas - Wall St and the City of London, Hollywood and the music industry - bullyboy management is endemic, raising the spectre of the horror-film scenario in which our organisations reprocess us in their own malign and shrunken image.
This is not an idle threat. The reverse process also holds - civilised behaviour begets civilised behaviour - but many of the things organisations do in the name of management encourage rather than dampen despot tendencies.
For example, hundreds of research studies confirm the adage that power corrupts.
But powerlessness corrupts, too. Many organisations aggravate the problem with "performance cultures" that reward a few stars and ignore the rest.
Yet, says Sutton, the evidence is clear and easily understandable: "If you want to have fewer assholes - and better organisational performance - reducing the status differences between the highest- and lowest-status members ... is the way to go."
This book is a blow for humanity as well as management. Life is too short.
-OBSERVER
