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Topic: RE: virus: Is your boss a psychopath? (Read 771 times) |
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Blunderov
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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
  
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RE: virus: Is your boss a psychopath?
« on: 2005-07-29 12:42:03 » |
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[Blunderov] If corporations provide an environment in which the psychopath
can flourish and testing is appropriate for this scenario, then this should
be doubly true for those who are appointed to public office surely?
Best Regards.
Fast Company
http://pf.fastcompany.com/magazine/96/open_boss.html
Is Your Boss a Psychopath?
Odds are you've run across one of these characters in your career. They're
glib, charming, manipulative, deceitful, ruthless -- and very, very
destructive. And there may be lots of them in America's corner offices.
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<snip>
One of the most provocative ideas about business in this decade so far
surfaced in a most unlikely place. The forum wasn't the Harvard Business
School or one of those $4,000-a-head conferences where Silicon Valley's
venture capitalists search for the next big thing. It was a convention of
Canadian cops in the far-flung province of Newfoundland. The speaker, a
71-year-old professor emeritus from the University of British Columbia,
remains virtually unknown in the business realm. But he's renowned in his
own field: criminal psychology. Robert Hare is the creator of the
Psychopathy Checklist. The 20-item personality evaluation has exerted
enormous influence in its quarter-century history. It's the standard tool
for making clinical diagnoses of psychopaths -- the 1% of the general
population that isn't burdened by conscience. Psychopaths have a profound
lack of empathy. They use other people callously and remorselessly for their
own ends. They seduce victims with a hypnotic charm that masks their true
nature as pathological liars, master con artists, and heartless
manipulators. Easily bored, they crave constant stimulation, so they seek
thrills from real-life "games" they can win -- and take pleasure from their
power over other people.
On that August day in 2002, Hare gave a talk on psychopathy to about 150
police and law-enforcement officials. He was a legendary figure to that
crowd. The FBI and the British justice system have long relied on his
advice. He created the P-Scan, a test widely used by police departments to
screen new recruits for psychopathy, and his ideas have inspired the testing
of firefighters, teachers, and operators of nuclear power plants.
According to the Canadian Press and Toronto Sun reporters who rescued the
moment from obscurity, Hare began by talking about Mafia hit men and sex
offenders, whose photos were projected on a large screen behind him. But
then those images were replaced by pictures of top executives from WorldCom,
which had just declared bankruptcy, and Enron, which imploded only months
earlier. The securities frauds would eventually lead to long prison
sentences for WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers and Enron CFO Andrew Fastow.
"These are callous, cold-blooded individuals," Hare said.
"They don't care that you have thoughts and feelings. They have no sense of
guilt or remorse." He talked about the pain and suffering the corporate
rogues had inflicted on thousands of people who had lost their jobs, or
their life's savings. Some of those victims would succumb to heart attacks
or commit suicide, he said.
Then Hare came out with a startling proposal. He said that the recent
corporate scandals could have been prevented if CEOs were screened for
psychopathic behavior. "Why wouldn't we want to screen them?" he asked. "We
screen police officers, teachers. Why not people who are going to handle
billions of dollars?"
It's Hare's latest contribution to the public awareness of "corporate
psychopathy." He appeared in the 2003 documentary The Corporation, giving
authority to the film's premise that corporations are "sociopathic" (a
synonym for "psychopathic") because they ruthlessly seek their own selfish
interests -- "shareholder value" -- without regard for the harms they cause
to others, such as environmental damage. </snip>
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Kharin
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In heaven all the interesting people are missing.
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Re: virus: Is your boss a psychopath?
« Reply #1 on: 2005-07-29 15:37:05 » |
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Actually, I tend to think the main advantage of a market economy is
that business provides an ideal displacement activity for the most
ruthless and malign members of society. Certainly, if you consider how
businesses are structured the correct political analogy for them would
be a fascist state rather than a democracy.
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simul
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I am a lama.
 
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Re: virus: Is your boss a psychopath?
« Reply #2 on: 2005-07-29 17:20:02 » |
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What's more, the rate at which affluent boss-types breed seems to be reduced. So, not only do we placate them with the baubles afforded by wealth, but we are less likely to see their perticular line of mutation recur.
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First, read Bruce Sterling's "Distraction", and then read http://electionmethods.org.
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Blunderov
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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
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RE: virus: Is your boss a psychopath?
« Reply #3 on: 2005-07-29 20:13:50 » |
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[Blunderov] I infer my score is rather low; not too many placatory baubles
seem to be finding their way in my direction.
Erik Aronesty
Sent: 29 July 2005 23:20
What's more, the rate at which affluent boss-types breed seems to be
reduced. So, not only do we placate them with the baubles afforded by
wealth, but we are less likely to see their perticular line of mutation
recur.
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