The Psychopath in the C-Suite. Corporate genius or psychopath?
It’s a thin line that divides them. Most people who work in companies run afoul of such a person at least once during their career. Some rise to astonishing heights, and they can cause enormous damage. Dealing with them can be tricky, but here are some tips. In Costa-Gavras’s film Le Capital, an unscrupulous banker sends his bank’s shares crashing in an insider-trading scam. Sounds preposterous? Some walk off with hefty bonuses. In an article entitled “The Psychopath in the C Suite”, Manfred Kets de Vries, INSEAD’s Raoul de Vitry d’Avaucourt Chaired Distinguished Clinical Professor of Leadership Development and Organisational Change defines a type of personality that he calls SOB, for Seductive Operational Bully. No sense of shame “SOBs can be found wherever power, status, or money is at stake,” he writes.
Greed, ambition and selfish disregard for others are nothing new in business. Emotional poverty Some lines of defence His advice? The 1% are the very best destroyers of wealth the world has ever seen. If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.
The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren't responsible. Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes.
The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves. Such results have been widely replicated. So much for the financial sector and its super-educated analysts. This is now changing. The psychopathy of the corporate personality; lessons for law from cognitive neurology. In cognitive neurology, ‘psychopathy’ does not mean ‘a tendency to kill someone’ as is common thought by the general public.
‘Psychopathy’ is literally a ‘suffering of the mind’, and is used by cognitive neurologists to refer to individuals who cannot understand the mental states of others. This inability to understand the mental state of another in your mind is thought to go to awry in autism, from the seminal work by Prof Uta Frith, at UCL (and who was awarded an Honorary Doctorate at Cambridge this year) and Prof Simon Baron-Cohen, Macurdy Professor of Abnormal Psychology at Cambridge.
It is even thought an ability to monitor to your own mental state, in particular distinguish internally-generated mental states from those of other people, can lead to conditions such as schizophrenia, causing delusions. Salomon v Salomon provides the pivotal House of Lords case in English law, establishing that the body corporate has a separate legal personality.
Related posts: Political Ponerology Home. The Psychopath in the C-Suite. The psychopathy of the corporate personality; lessons for law from cognitive neurology.