STOCK MARKET WATCH, Thursday, December 15, 2011

[Ghost Dog]

84. Executive Psychopaths, Harvard Business Review, October 2004

by Gardiner Morse
Chances are good there’s a psychopath on your management team. Seriously. I’m not talking about the “psycho” boss that employees like to carp about—the hard-driving supervisor who sometimes loses it. He’s just difficult. Nor am I referring to the sort of homicidal “psychopath” Hollywood likes to serve up—Freddy Krueger, say, or Brando’s Colonel Kurtz. Neither is, clinically speaking, a psychopath.

I’m talking about the real thing, the roughly 1% of the population that is certifiably psychopathic. True psychopaths are diagnosed according to very specific clinical criteria, and they’re nothing like the popular conception. What stands out about bona fide psychopaths is that they’re so hard to spot. They’re chameleons. They have a cunning ability to act perfectly normally and indeed to be utterly charming, as they wreak havoc on the lives of the people around them and the companies they inhabit.

Many of psychopaths’ defining characteristics—their polish, charm, cool decisiveness, and fondness for the fast lane—are easily, and often, mistaken for leadership qualities. That’s why they may be singled out for promotion. But along with their charisma come the traits that make psychopaths so destructive: They’re cunning, manipulative, untrustworthy, unethical, parasitic, and utterly remorseless. There’s nothing they won’t do, and no one they won’t exploit, to get what they want. A psychopathic manager with his eye on a colleague’s job, for instance, will doctor financial results, plant rumors, turn coworkers against each other, and shift his persona as needed to destroy his target. He’ll do it, and his bosses will never know. <-- Except when the bosses (which psychopaths clearly have a tendency to become) are psychopaths too.

/... http://hbr.org/2004/10/executive-psychopaths/ar/1

We're dealing with extremely psychopathic capitalism now. It is destroying everything. Biospheric stability included.