No Assholes or Douchebags, Please

I’m reading a business book entitled “The No Asshole Rule”, the premise of which is that assholery costs businesses big time and that if companies calculated the costs that assholes represented they would reform them or show them the door. I’ve had the misfortune to work with and for many assholes in my career (they are everywhere), and the book makes perfect sense to me.

I once worked for a company in which the CEO regarded being an asshole as a critical part of good management. If the people under you were happy, then you weren’t doing your job. Fear was the great motivator in his view, and there were none in the organization to gainsay him since he surrounded himself mainly with sycophants. I didn’t last long because I couldn’t stand the Great Business Genius and his fawning aides. I could see that his style resulted in high turnover and lower productivity and an increase in theft. He could not. The company ended up in Chapter 11, thanks in large part to the Genius.

The book defines asshole a little narrowly for my tastes and limits it to overt hostility. I reckon that passive-aggressive managers are just as difficult and costly as regular assholes, although they might more properly be labeled douchebags. Perhaps a sequel “The No Douchebag Rule” would be in order. I am talking about bosses who won’t outright call you an idiot to your face but who, by their actions, let it be known that that is exactly what they think. You know the ones who undermine everything you do and micromanage you to death. The ones who call up someone else right in front of you to check whether your suggestion or statement is on target. The ones who are unnecessarily secretive and withhold information that you need to do your job.

The douchebags are worse than assholes in many ways because they can fall back on plausible deniability.