Just How Difficult Are You?

You are without a doubt the most pretentious, self-absorbed, arrogant, vain and ruthless little tyrant I have ever had the misfortune of knowing. You are emotionally unbalanced and delusional.  For some reason you believe you are special and entitled, demanding praise and attention and privileges you haven't earned and don't deserve--yet you are shamelessly uninterested in the needs and feelings of others. You exploit, criticize, scapegoat and treat others contemptuously, yet you can't tolerate a single word of criticism.  There's only one way to describe you. You are:

(a)  A real jerk

(b)  An infant

(c)  A CEO

(d)  A narcissist

(e)  Other _______________

People I ask seem to be able to identify, without hesitation or difficulty, somebody they know who fits this description, so they quickly and emphatically answer this multiple choice question.  Corporate types tend to choose answers (a) or (c) although in the write-in category (e) the most common answer is "A real asshole" (more on this crass yet technical academic term later.) Politicians, lawyers and ex-spouses also get honorable mention in (e).  Parents of young children, and students of Freud who have read "On Narcissism" (which introduces the concept of His Majesty the Baby) might choose (b).  Psychology majors and anyone who has ever read a book or an article in Time Magazine by Jeffrey Kluger tend to offer up the textbook answer (d), i.e., a person who behaves this way is usually described as a narcissist.
Most of us know the story of Narcissus, retold succinctly in a New Yorker piece by Joan Acocella called Selfie:

In Book III of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, from the first century B.C., we meet Narcissus, a young man so handsome that all the nymphs are in love with him. He doesn’t understand why; he wishes they would leave him alone. One day, in the woods, he comes upon a pool of water and leans over to take a drink. In the reflection, he sees his face for the first time, and falls in love. He swoons, he kisses his image, but he cannot have the thing he desires. In despair, he stops eating, stops sleeping. Finally, he lays his head down on the greensward and dies.

There are longer and darker versions of the story, but the prevailing theme is that Narcissus is so taken with himself that he is incapable of paying attention to anything or anyone else. Narcissism is sometimes described as a "fixation with oneself" but the American Psychiatric Association actually classifies it as a personality disorder.  In Selfie, Acocella also tells us that according to the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) the primary characteristic of narcissism is grandiosity:

Narcissists exaggerate their achievements and what they are certain will be their future triumphs. They believe that they are special and can be understood only by special people, of high status. They feel entitled to extraordinary privileges. (They have the right to cut in line, to dominate the conversation, etc.) They show no empathy for other people. They envy them, and believe that they are envied in return. They cannot tolerate criticism.

If you really want to dig into narcissism, there is no shortage of reading material out there.  I recently read Why Is It Always About You? The Seven Deadly Sins of Narcissism by Sandy Hotchkiss.  She describes seven categories of narcissistic behavior (Shamelessness, Magical Thinking, Arrogance, Envy, Entitlement, Exploitation, and Bad Boundaries) so well that if you read her book you might begin to feel a bit uneasy about your own narcissistic tendencies.  The good news is that if you worry about such things you probably aren't really a narcissist, but just to be sure you can take a quiz here.  It is the Narcissistic Personality Inventory developed by Robert Raskin and Howard Terry of the University of California, Berkeley. I felt a little better after taking the quiz.

Of course the world is teeming with all kinds of people we perceive as difficult, not just narcissists but an eclectic assortment of know-it-alls, liars, cheaters, whiners, complainers, slackers, back-stabbers, perfectionists, illusionists, abusers, bullies, tormentors, mean-spirited rogues, and otherwise nasty weasels.  Robert Sutton, a professor at Stanford University, lumps them all into one descriptive category: assholes.  His entertaining book The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One that Isn't establishes two tests for determining whether someone fits into that category:

• After talking to the alleged asshole, does the "target" feel oppressed, humiliated, de-energized, or belittled? Does he or she feel worse about him or herself?
• Does the alleged asshole aim his or her venom at people who are less powerful rather than at those people who are more powerful?

Sutton also identifies twelve techniques assholes commonly use:

• Personal insults
• Invading "personal territory"
• Uninvited physical contact
• Threats and intimidation
• Sarcastic jokes and teasing, used as insult delivery systems
• Withering email flames
• Status slaps, intended to humiliate victims
• Public shaming
• Rude interruptions
• Two-faced attacks
• Treating people as if they are invisible

Any of this sound familiar? Of course it does. I hear you, and I feel your pain!  I can think of dozens of people I've worked with just in the past ten years who fit quite comfortably into this category. Sutton reminds us that even Steve Jobs, celebrated for his ability to imagine, inspire, motivate and create, was notorious for behaving poorly and routinely used many of these techniques. But while most of us have such tendencies and may slip into poor behavior patterns on occasion, there's a big difference between what he calls "temporary" and "certified" assholes: to qualify as "certified" you have to behave poorly persistently.  If you want to see where you fit on the scale, take Sutton's Asshole Rating Self Exam (ARSE, of course...would you expect anything else?) here, but steel yourself: if your self-rating score gets to a certain level, you will see this admonition from Sutton:

You sound like a full-blown certified asshole to me, get help immediately.  But, please, don't come to me for help, as I would rather not meet you.

Good luck, and be careful out there.

Dean K. Harring, CPCU, CIC is a retired Chief Claims Officer and an expert and advisor on property-casualty insurance claims and operations.  He can be reached at dean.harring@theclm.org or through  LinkedIn or Twitter.

Digital Destruction and Big Bang Disruption

My wife is a project manager who is responsible for business operations at our local high school. She hired some people this summer to process and distribute new textbooks within the school, but they hadn't finished the job and school was about to open, so she needed someone to come in at the last minute and help get the work done. More specifically, someone who would follow her instructions and would not expect to get paid. So I spent a long Saturday with her at the school, schlepping pallets and boxes of new textbooks to the classrooms, getting everything in place in time for the start of the new school year.

I wasn't happy with the work (the school was hot, the textbooks heavy) and more than once I thought wistfully about Steve Jobs, who according to biographer Walter Isaacson, had targeted the school textbook business as an "$8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction." Targeting textbooks seemed like a good idea to me because not only are they big and heavy and expensive--they don't update easily, either. Unfortunately, Jobs didn't live long enough to disrupt the textbook industry, but others are on the same path and, selfishly, I wish them well! Check out The Object Formerly Known As The Textbook for an interesting look at how textbook publishers and software companies and educational institutions are juggling for position as textbooks evolve into courseware. Also, As More Schools Embrace Tablets, Do Textbooks Have a Fighting Chance? takes a look at how The Los Angeles Unified School District—second largest school district in the country—is equipping students with iPads and delivering textbooks digitally in a partnership with giant book publisher Pearson.

Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator's Dilemma, is credited with coming up with the term "disruptive innovation," which he defined as:

...a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors.

These days we tend to associate disruptive innovation with a new or improved product or service that surprises the market, especially established, industry-leading competitors, and increases customer accessibility while lowering costs. The notion is appealing, and it makes for exciting business adventure tales featuring scrappy, innovative underdogs overcoming entrenched, clueless market leaders. Of course disruptive innovation has been happening for a long time, even if it was called something else, but lately technology has made it easier and cheaper for upstart firms to take on industries they think are "ripe for digital destruction."

In her recent article The Disruption Machine, Harvard professor and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore squinted hard at disruption theory, though:

Ever since “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” everyone is either disrupting or being disrupted. There are disruption consultants, disruption conferences, and disruption seminars. This fall, the University of Southern California is opening a new program: “The degree is in disruption,” the university announced.

By the way, USC's Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy for Arts, Technology and the Business of Innovation is in fact opening this year and will focus on critical thinking with plans, according to the Academy website, to "...empower the next generation of disruptors and professional thought leaders who will ply their skills in a global area." And yes, that is Dr. Dre's name on the Academy!

But there are others who believe we have now entered a decidedly more treacherous innovation environment, one that Josh Linkner in The Road to Reinvention says is forcing companies to systematically and continually challenge and reinvent themselves in order to survive. His fundamental question is this: "Will you disrupt, or be disrupted?" And Paul Nunes and Larry Downes, Accenture folks who wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review Magazine in 2013 entitled Big Bang Disruption (they have a new book on the same topic, summarized by Accenture here) warn of a new type of innovation which is more than disruptive--it's devastating:

...a Big Bang Disruptor is both better and cheaper from the moment of creation. Using new technologies...Big Bang Disruptors can destabilize mature industries in record time, leaving incumbents and their supply-chain partners dazed and devastated.

Should CEOs be worried? When Mikhail Gorbachev visited Harvard in 2007 and said “If you don’t move forward, sooner or later you begin to move backward”, he was talking about politics and multilateral nuclear treaties, not companies, but the warning certainly could have been directed at company CEOs. That message, refreshed to incorporate the disruptive and big bang innovation threats that have emerged since then, seems a bit unsettling: If you run a company and you aren't dedicating resources to continually scanning the marketplace for threats and improving and reinventing your business, if you are instead taking a "business as usual" approach, you are at risk of being marginalized or supplanted by competitors who will bring new products, services, experiences, efficiencies, cost structures and insights to your customers. Maybe not this year, or next year, but sometime soon. It's not a question of whether it will happen, but when. Thus Linkner's question, restated: Will you disrupt yourself, or be disrupted by someone else?

Of course some industries, like property casualty insurance, may not be high on anyone's "ripe for digital destruction" list, so maybe there's no need for insurance company CEOs to worry. Except perhaps about Google and Amazon. I keep thinking back to Blockbuster CEO Jim Keyes' comments to The Motley Fool in 2008: "Neither RedBox nor Netflix are even on the radar screen in terms of competition." You know the rest of the story, which illustrates the real-life consequences of an incumbent underestimating and then becoming "dazed and devastated" by a competitor.

Dean K. Harrring, CPCU, CIC is a retired Chief Claims Officer and an expert and advisor on property casualty insurance claims and operations.  He can be reached at dean.harring@theclm.org or through  LinkedIn or Twitter.