What do you do with the Brilliant Jerk?

http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/26/what-do-you-do-with-the-brilliant-jerk/

by NelsonMinar • 14 years ago

56 86 14 years ago

boss.blogs.nytimes.com

debacle2• 14 years ago

This is a very feel-good article, but the reality is that it's very likely that if you're working at a startup that's going to succeed, the boss himself is a "brilliant jerk."

The world needs brilliant jerks. They get things done, partially because they're brilliant but also sometimes because they're jerks.

Wistar• 14 years ago

The world needs brilliant jerks but perhaps at the helm of their own company.

0003• 14 years ago

Yes. How is the Brilliant Jerk doctor who has "spent the next couple of years attacking the company from every conceivable angle: poaching employees, helping competitors and starting legal battles" company doing versus his old company?

noonespecial• 14 years ago

This is dangerous advice. Brilliant people work for your startup for less than they could make at bigcorp because they believe in the vision. If you show them the door as soon as you get what you want out of them, you're in for a world of hurt.

This seems to be exactly what happened to the OP. The superstar spent years after poaching employees and starting trouble.

woodchuck64• 14 years ago

He says the Brilliant Jerk quit and then spent years poaching employees and starting trouble. Working on an amicable parting well before that is the OP's advice.

rhizome4• 14 years ago

As long as any failure to engineer an amiable parting is blamed on the "jerk."

beezee• 14 years ago

best point i've seen yet- if he's poaching employees means they were poachable, and you can't poach a happy employee

malvosenior2• 14 years ago

So because this guy can't manage high-end talent, his answer is to fire any high-end talent that somehow makes it through the door. Great advice :/

I've mentioned it previously here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4503224) but this is a classic example of management ineptitude and ego passing up opportunities because it's "hard" to be challenged by someone more intelligent than yourself.

seivan• 14 years ago

Great read, thanks!

batgaijin• 14 years ago

Where does this attitude come from? It's like saying "Well, I could hire someone with a power-tool to fix up my house, but I don't know how those fancy machines work. I know! I'll hire that old carpenter down the street and watch him work over his shoulder!"

ajross• 14 years ago

It comes from the fact that the power tool user won't just fix your house, she'll also yell at you about how the design is bad and you need to be doing these other six things to fix it. The carpenter will just shut up and do his job.

So if you're someone who wants to plan your own house (and especially if you're someone who feels like you need "authority" to do it) you have a built-in incentive to ban power tools from the workplace.

bjourne• 14 years ago

How would you feel if someone was doing a 10x better job than you? That's the difference between a brilliant engineer and an average one. It doesn't matter if the guy is the nicest person on earth, people will feel threatened by that kind of skill. I don't know how to deal with that situation, the normal human response seem to be to ostracize outliers which an extremely talented developer is.

malvosenior2• 14 years ago

I'd feel like I had no business working with such a person and it would be management's fault for hiring me.

Excellent engineers should only be managed by excellent managers. Excellent managers should only hire 5X+ developers, there's no reason to hire anyone worse than that. If you absolutely must, keep the grunt team heavily partitioned away from the real team and DON'T let them dictate strategy or culture.

I think the root of this problem is that most of the people who have access to capital really aren't 10X at anything so you have an extreme mismatch of skill vs. authority in most companies.

kstenerud• 14 years ago

Spot on. Passion is great, and a necessary ingredient to get a start-up off the ground, but even if someone produces double the value of anyone else at the company, it's still a net loss if he's demoralizing the team.

rhizome4• 14 years ago

You quantify every facet but the last. How are you measuring "demoralization," and at what multiple of value does the net loss even out? In other words, show your work.

perlpimp• 14 years ago

that is the trouble brilliant jerks produce 100 to 1000 times the value. what they create will pay in long term.

mdkess• 14 years ago

The nail that sticks out gets the hammer. Brilliant management strategy.

rhizome4• 14 years ago

Sarcasm?

bduerst• 14 years ago

Yes.

MrMan2• 14 years ago

https://docs.google.com/open?id=1esoJHLqo69cxlDT0xPgR42zSIX0...

indiecore• 14 years ago

Suck them dry then kick them out. Brilliant management.

option_greek2• 14 years ago

"The likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Roger Ailes have had no problem showing Brilliant Jerks the door, and all built world-class brands faster and better than the rest of us."

It might be true but there was a period when SJ himself was a brilliant jerk. I don't think firing him did any good to apple.

debacle2• 14 years ago

Bill Gates, too, was a brilliant jerk, and probably in a bigger if different way than Jobs.

calinet63• 14 years ago

Could it be that people are complex? That they are more than a two word label? What a conclusion that would be.

option_greek2• 14 years ago

Yup, from most accounts. Overall this is nice article on how to mismanage talent and turn innovative companies into dinosaurs.

qdog• 14 years ago

I think Gates owned too much of the company, this guy is talking about hires it sounds like.

tisme2• 14 years ago

> I don't think firing him did any good to apple.

By a roundabout way, it did! If Jobs had not been fired from apple he would not have learned a whole slew of valuable lessons which he applied upon his return.

egiva• 14 years ago

I was thinking the same thing - today's Brilliant Jerk is tomorrow's visionary - just look at Steve Jobs as a good example. People also adapt and change over time, so that's important to take into account. I think the comments here all show that this brilliant jerk phenomenon is an oversimplification of something we've all experienced at work.

joelrunyon2• 14 years ago

It seems "visionary" is turned to jerk when he's pushed down the ladder and stripped of any ability to do anything.

Even the author says "When we hired him, we hired over our heads."

I fail to see how this is a cautionary tale of hiring and firing "brilliant jerks." It reeks much more of incompetent management.

nnq• 14 years ago

Or take it this way: the "brilliant jerk"'s vision was no longer the same as the "boss"'s vision for where the company should be going (and bien sur, the other employees sheepishly followed the "boss"'s vision). Just don't call someone a jerk if your vision (shared by the heard of sheep you control) is not the same as your vision the team's vision! Some very smart people are "lone wolves" and they should be respected for what they are, not called jerks because they scare/disturb your other faithful "sheeployees".

j_baker2• 14 years ago

The problem is this: it's incredibly difficult to distinguish a brilliant person who lacks people skills from a jerk who convinces people they're brilliant. The doctor in the author's story sounds like the latter. The key clue: the doctor always worked for people on holidays and weekends. I find that jerks are generally very good at looking much busier than they actually are, and this is a very good way to do that.

joezydeco2• 14 years ago

The article says he offered first to work on holidays. I'd like to believe sick people don't take holidays off and doctors would probably be pretty busy on these days, just like any other.

Maybe the Jerk doctor in this article is fed up with stepping in and working extra to keep the business working and the reciprocity has dried up.

j_baker2• 14 years ago

Yup. This was why I said it's difficult to distinguish a brilliant person who has little people skills from a jerk who's good at convincing others they're brilliant. And you're certainly correct to point out that this doctor could have been nothing more than a management scapegoat. I've seen that and lived it.

At the same time, I've seen people convince others that they're doing the business a favor by hoarding all the work, working long hours, taking credit for others' work, and building up systems that require their knowledge to operate. This is all well and good in a startup where you have few people, but it's murder any time you go beyond that.

loumf• 14 years ago

Double the revenue of others and top revenue producer shows some talent that is useful to the business. Also, leveraged himself with spreading training.

kimmel• 14 years ago

Here is an accurate tl;dr of this article:

"I am too stupid to manage employees smarter than me so I label them and get rid of them. I am always correct and everyone else is wrong and this has nothing to do with me being the boss."

Also that line about Gates and Jobs is just there so the author can try and draw a parallel to them and thus inflate their position and validate their actions.

flatline33• 14 years ago

This is the kind of argument that you see from "stage 2" or "stage 3" management teams installed at a startup. These are the people brought on when the investors or CEO decide (mistakenly) that they now need "real" management, and then proceed to hire the worst possible kind.

This kind of management strives to guide the now-profitable and low-risk venture towards a state of permanent mediocrity; the remaining smart, stellar people merely stand in the way.

The new management's desire is to secure their position in the organization by instituting policies that require that information and knowledge flow through them, amassing a greater base of direct and indirect reports, and redefining their internal metrics of "success" in a way that's genuinely divorced from external reality.

The Brilliant Jerk in this situation should be promoted, the new management should never have been hired.

joezydeco2• 14 years ago

Funny thing. I'm in this very exact situation and, indeed, I feel like the Brilliant Jerk these days.

We recently made our B-series round. The CEO and CFO have been in closed door meetings for months, leaving us adrift. The VC firm has installed people on the board and in the office, so they need attention. The people around here that put in the late nights and hair-tearing conference calls are pretty much being ignored. Communication has fallen off a cliff. But hey, we're a Real Company now!

Good thing I'm turning in my notice next week.

calinet63• 14 years ago

Pigeon-holing people is a great way to make them into lesser human beings, and companies into the insensitive bureaucracies that good talent loves to avoid.

Talk to the person for pete's sake. If they're underperforming or their net contribution to the company (via culture or performance) is negative, then work with them to improve or work with them to change jobs. Maybe they need a different position. Maybe they need to leave and start their own company.

But if you label them, put them down, and attempt to deal with them "as a problem" rather than as a human being, then yes, you will have problems.

This is just an example of inept management of talent, nothing more. I encourage everyone to disregard this article except as a case study in how not to manage people, and try to do better.

calinet63• 14 years ago

I'm going to reply to myself with a counter-argument. I just remembered the "No Asshole Rule," which is a great book with similar themes. I think there's a difference between someone who is simply an asshole, and someone who is tenacious and sometimes a jerk to management (which the OP article seems to show) and disagrees openly. The latter might be an asset, the former is almost always a net negative.

The point is, you have to evaluate these situations on their merits. If someone really is dividing the company and producing a negative effect, then obviously you need to deal with that in some way. But if they're not destroying the culture (indeed most are adding to it in some way if they care about the company and work hard), then it's not a cut-and-dry decision.

However, the No Asshole Rule makes some very good points along these lines, so perhaps there is merit to the idea of avoiding jerks at any costs from the beginning.

zdw• 14 years ago

Reminds me of this:

http://bhorowitz.com/2011/01/04/when-smart-people-are-bad-em...

The solution - if it's worth it, personally mitigate their bad behavior. If you can't make them a net positive, drop them.

danielweber• 14 years ago

I watched a manager try (almost) his hardest to mitigate an asshole employee. The employee insisted on being an asshole and used the mitigation as an excuse to be even more of an asshole.

I say "almost" above because the manager should have fired his ass. He didn't because he was a personal friend that he personally brought into the company, which was another failing.

blhack• 14 years ago

Covering for people on holidays? What an JERK!

Bringing in the most revenue and publishing the most? PSH! What a totally useless bit of dead weight!

Oh, and the other people in the group respect this guy? What are they idiots? Don't they know they should be respecting me?

edit: ya know, reading this and some other things about how "smart people" are so bad at communicating, except to other "smart people" makes we wonder what the managers are actually doing.

Clearly the can't actually manage the talent, they can't even figure out how to talk to them. You see that's you're job, managers, managing the talent. If you can't handle that thing that is right there in your title, then what the hell are you doing here? You're not fit for the job.

To me the answer seems obvious: flatten out your org, put "smart people" at the top, and ditch the guy whose response to acquiring talent is to fire them. He's the weak link.

stephengillie• 14 years ago

"You know that guy who's been here from the beginning, he's mentored most of us and covered 75% of the sick days and holidays and outages since we started?"

"Yea, what about him?"

"I fired him cuz I didn't like his attitude anymore. We're a growing company and we can't have jerks like that on the team."

"What took you so long?"

That is NOT the kind of company I want to work for.

jakejake3• 14 years ago

I've worked with some "brilliant jerks" before. But they were never the type to cover on holidays, bring in the most revenue, etc. The brilliant jerks I knew tended to be selfish and negative. Perhaps he didn't share the company vision, but this guy didn't sound like a jerk (well, until he started suing the company after he left).

I will say that the true jerks have a way of worming their way into the company. For example they'll do a lot of work with the goal of making sure they're the only one who understands some certain process. Then they horde knowledge and never want anyone else in there or any documentation to exist. The team is afraid to fire them because nobody knows or has the time to learn that part of the system.

rhizome4• 14 years ago

Mortgage-driven development is distinct from "brilliant jerk."

http://codemanship.co.uk/parlezuml/blog/?postid=147

zaidmo• 14 years ago

I was hoping / expecting the article to conclude with a recommendation on how to best channel the energy / talent of the "brilliant jerk". Not have this person fired. Promote him, but limit him, under a specifically defined position in the company where the boundaries are set - e.g. Head of Product Development, Head of Business Ops, Line Management, Finance...

I'm a Stargate fan and when I read brilliant jerk, I thought Rodney McKay and Nicholas Rush. Yeah, they had there issues, but at the end of the day, you can count on them...

F_J_H2• 14 years ago

I'm curious, how much management experience do you have? More specifically, for how many years have you managed a company with 5 or more employees?

flatline33• 14 years ago

Do you have a point that you intend to write a supporting argument for, or are you just casting aspersions?

adamc• 14 years ago

The question is whether that scales past a certain point.

I've worked with a few "Brilliant Jerks"; it's probably not the best name, but there are people who mean the best and will probably be stars in one environment but will demoralize larger teams. I thought that was what the author was trying to discuss.

cmos• 14 years ago

The brilliant jerk will sabotage a growing company.

When the company is no longer relying on their expertise the jerk needs to supplement the adrenaline rush of being important, so they create drama around the new people you have brought on board, justified or not.

That is the case for firing them. It is something of a 'coming of age' for a startup when amazing employees can't handle the growth outside of the garage.

If the jerk is not sabotaging the growth then by all means, give them new challenges that are crucial to the company.. but perhaps you don't actually have a brilliant jerk problem. You have a brilliant employee who can learn to change and grow with the company. That is not what the article is describing.

wissler• 14 years ago

Nice way to get rid of honest and insightful employees.

"He who dares not offend cannot be honest."--Thomas Paine

NelsonMinar• 14 years ago

I figured the Hacker News crowd would hate this article but I thought it was well written and worth posting. I've been a bit of the Brilliant Jerk myself in jobs and I've also been a manager at places with a Brilliant Jerk problem. I've personally seen how the rest of a group can do much better if you remove someone causing problems. Sometimes you find the other non-jerks are brilliant too, they just need the room to shine.

The key takeaway for me from this article is that startup employee culture is as important as technical ability. It's a scaling challenge; if you need to go from 3 people to 20+ and one of those earliest people is poisoning the culture you have a real problem. Hopefully good management can address that problem without going so far as firing someone. But sometimes the solution is to get rid of a jerk, no matter how brilliant they are.

strlen• 14 years ago

I think the article uses the term "Brilliant Jerk" to describe someone who is technically brilliant but not politically apt or motivated by money ("brilliant businessmen"). That's not what I (and probably you) mean by the term. Managers that view allowing employees to work from home or giving them challenging technical work as "coddling" are the real jerks in my opinion (albeit not brilliant ones).

The article could be right if it spoke about genuine "brilliant jerks". Companies I've worked have passed on candidates who aced the technical interview but then proceeded to yell at at interviewers when there was a disagreement or make sexist remarks (duh on the latter point).

I am not saying it doesn't happen, I've yet to encounter any existing employees who were truly brilliant jerks: I've encountered brilliant engineers who had trouble related and showed impatience with average (that is average compared to other engineers within the company) engineers, but none were worth firing. They also had a particular eye for under-appreciated talent and would often spot and mentor employees with high potential, but who had underperformed (compared to their potential that is -- they may have still done well in a stack ranking, but they had the potential to contribute a lot more) whether due to lack of focus, lack of self discipline, or plain inexperience (almost always a lack of debugging skills).

I have also encountered employees who were jerks, were technically good (but never true outliers) but were political and were more interested in growing their power rather than technical excellence. They would be worth firing, but the problem is jerks follow a "kiss up, kick down" pattern: traditional ("micro-") managers love them and give them free reign to bully other employees (including the technically brilliant but less socially and politically apt individual contributors).

No solution is going to be perfect -- and I am not nearly experienced enough to speak from anything but gut feel -- but what seems to work (and have created engineerings organizations where I enjoy/have enjoyed working) is:

1) Filter out jerks, ladder climbers (those more motivated by status and money than by impact, learning, or solving hard problems) as a part of the hiring process (which includes -- but is not limited to -- the interview process).

2) Take extra-ordinary steps to reduce company politics. This is easier said than done: good[1] startups avoid that because everyone is aligned to the same goal, the trick is maintaining that kind of an alignment as the companies grows. I am currently reaping the fruits of such an atmosphere, but I am still learning and trying to understand how this is accomplished.

[1] There are just as many terrible startups as there are amazing ones -- and there is less of a thing such as "an average startup". Quality (in terms of "place to work") follows an inverted Bell Curve. I have heard (but fortunately haven't experienced firsthand) my share of horror stories of small startups that are far more political at 20 people than Google was at 20,000 people. Naturally, the earlier the stage, the greater the variance.

bps4484• 14 years ago

I'm asking you this question because you seem to support the article, what exactly do you think the author means by the term "brilliant jerk"? It seems like their description is of a very nice, respectful, talented person, but who maybe is open about their disagreements with decisions that are being made? Am I correct? I just don't understand how this person is a "Jerk". I value someone like this in a company, they are the ones who usually stop a bad decision from being made.

I've dealt with what I thought were brilliant jerks before, and they always made people feel small and inadequate, and generally had an attitude of annoyance with "lesser mortals", if you will. This didn't change whether the company was 3 people or 100 people.

Is my analysis of that author's type of "Brilliant Jerk" correct? And if so, what are the problems that the "Brilliant Jerk" causes as the team grows.

macchina• 14 years ago

Seems to me that this quote applies: "If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking."

doktrin• 14 years ago

I am uncomfortable with the advice being doled out here. In all cases mentioned, the "brilliant jerks" were clearly invaluable to the venture. In both cases they would literally not have gotten past the early startup stage without them. However, once they become inconvenient to manage, the "only" solution was too fire them.

Not only does this strike me as a mismanagement of talent, but it is almost bordering on the unethical. While I do not claim to know the specifics involved, some of the anecdotes gave me pause :

>> And the Brilliant Jerk speaks the truth. But I have also seen him stick his head in the door and deflate an entire management team. A growth company needs enablers, not disablers.

A growth company also needs sensible advice, and sensible advice should not be confused with being a "disabler". Too often I have seen rational advice get dismissed because reality isn't compatible with someone's bold new plan.

Not knowing the specifics here, it's not too hard to imagine a scenario in which a "management" team gets carried away with lofty and unrealistic goals only to be "deflated" by someone with actual technical insight.

eli• 14 years ago

I mostly agree with you. But I have also seen how one person with a really bad attitude can affect an entire team.

CodeMage• 14 years ago

If that person happens to be the person without which it would have been impossible to have that team in the first place, then maybe the right thing is to find out why they have that bad attitude and what can be done to change it.

codegeek• 14 years ago

Can someone explain the tl;dr of this post to me ? This is what I got :

Brilliant jerk is great for a startup but get rid of him if you are no longer a startup and growing rapidly ?

zem2• 14 years ago

here's my take on it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4577003

tisme2• 14 years ago

Suggestion: abdicate and re-hire this guy as your next CEO.

jseims• 14 years ago

I think the negative comments here are missing the fine points of the article.

* Stage of growth is important. In the beginning, success is more about individual effort. When you get bigger, it's more about overall team culture.

* It's not just "being a jerk" that's the problem. It's being a naysayer, working against the culture.

At a certain size, the negative effects of someone's behavior on the culture can outweigh the positives of their brilliance. And when that happens, you have to let them go.

spaghetti• 14 years ago

In my mind the labels "brilliant" and "jerk" contradict each other. When someone is truly bright they will realize how much can be gained from learning to interact with other people, building rapport with coworkers etc. These skills can be practiced and the payoff is immense. I'd bet that even Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had to build rapport with at least their immediate reports.

There are certainly corner cases. For example a company developing a particular technology might need some savant for a while to build the proof-of-concept product. However once that's done this employee's abrasive nature can have a negative impact on other employees and company culture. In this rare case I'd choose compassion for the employee. This could involve working with them, giving them projects they enjoy that don't involve working with others or even recommending them to another company with a note about their talent and people skills trade-off.

There's also the case where an employee is regarded as brilliant but lacking people skills and is just plain dysfunctional. The technical skills are lacking but people are afraid to confront the person because they will yell or become angry. In this case the person should be fired ASAP.

lnanek2• 14 years ago

Hahaha, I've been in that position before. Was asked to join an exercise tracking startup. They decided to pivot to calorie counting and focus on users who only walk for exercise and do it once or twice a month. They also didn't like fixing bugs and building test harnesses and the like in many cases, thinking they often just helped a few people.

I did my job, but I sure as hell poured all my weekend and personal time into the exercise stuff and bug fixing. Really pissed off the CTO who took it personally that I was not working on his weight loss stuff in my personal time as well as my on the clock time. I think, to run a good company, you have to combine everyone's desires. Letting me work on my things in my time would have been the way to do that. Instead the managers just go ape shit over someone who doesn't fit into the homogenous culture they want.

tnuc• 14 years ago

The article sounds like the author didn't like people listening to someone other than himself.

The writer didn't say what his input or benefit was to this outfit. I know who I would have fired.

Firing to keep things running smoothly is easy. Managing people to move forward is tough.

trotsky• 14 years ago

Well that's the first time I've ever read a complex justification for firing people who don't like you in the new york times.

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

An interesting read, I've been in both situations one where the 'toxic rockstar' was managed out and one where the 'toxic rockstar' was tolerated because of their code output.

The critical bit though is toxicity. There are people like Jeff Dean at Google who are 10x more productive than anyone else but make everyone work harder, and there are people who are 10x more productive but they make everyone around them feel like crap. That makes them toxic.

So if your brilliant engineer spends their time telling younger or less brilliant engineers how they just threw out all their crappy (but functional) code and re-wrote so that they could tolerate reading it, it doesn't bring others along. If they 'sign up' for all of the work so it will "be done right" and then slow the whole project down because nobody can work on it, they aren't "adding value."

I think the author was going for people who had become toxic, not people who were still moving everyone forward.

flatline33• 14 years ago

> So if your brilliant engineer spends their time telling younger or less brilliant engineers how they just threw out all their crappy (but functional) code and re-wrote so that they could tolerate reading it, it doesn't bring others along. If they 'sign up' for all of the work so it will "be done right" and then slow the whole project down because nobody can work on it, they aren't "adding value."

The problem might be hiring the younger or less brilliant engineers, and also placing them in positions where they cause significant damage, as it's driving your brilliant engineers to be toxic.

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

That is certainly a possibility. Its kind of a sucky place to be where you have to choose between one bright engineer or a bunch of less bright engineers because they can't work together.

lolcraft• 14 years ago

Actually, I agree with the article: if you have a Brilliant Jerk on board, please fire them as soon as they've got another job. Think of it not as your company outgrowing this person. Rather, face that this Jerk is simply in another level. Your big, homogeinized corporation can't play it anymore. They need to graduate to bigger things.

Honestly, if I were to manage the kind of self-driven, startup oriented, charismatic doctor that the article talks about, I would feel like I was wasting their talent every time they came to work. This kind of talent doesn't belong in a proverbially esclerotic Enterprise, it belongs in a medical startup or something. Kick them out and send them to an employer that really needs someone like them. You're not that startup, you're BigCorp now. Put on your grey suit.

Daniel_Newby• 14 years ago

Dunbar's number: you can only maintain personal relationships with about 150 people.

When a company grows beyond this limit, it has to be managed by process and hierarchy. The human brain simply cannot apply tribal management to a few thousand employees, contractors, suppliers, customers, business partners, etc.

If you tell your friends "You guys are crazy, that will never work", they interpret it through an emotional lens that will probably make them enthusiastic about trying harder with a different approach. If you do the same thing to a task group you barely know, their enthusiasm will evaporate and at least a few will start working on their resumes. This is the Brilliant Jerk problem.

Some of these Brilliant Jerks can probably be retrained to work in the new, larger company. The thesis of the article is that some of them cannot, and it is best to jettison them sooner rather than later.

marshray• 14 years ago

Looking at the context, their "start up" is a group of doctors. A medical practice. If you can obtain the right mix of credentials, this is one of the most time-tested service businesses there is. Medical practices regularly persist for decades at a time.

A web search for "STI Knowledge" http://www.the-resource-center.com/catalogs/sti_knowledge_ce... suggests they do training seminars for help desk staff.

Sounds to me like this guy doesn't have a clue about the kind of talent management applicable to high-tech startups.

zem2• 14 years ago

i think the author's point was a bit subtler than most of the comments here give him credit for; he just clouded the issue with the unfortunate word "jerk". what he's describing is a high-performing, brilliant person who, when he doesn't agree with the new direction the company is taking, neither leaves nor realigns himself, but spends his time and energy trying to drag things back around to his preferred vector. however productive he might have been, he clearly has at least the potential to be a net drain now.

OldSchool• 14 years ago

Bad title for the article in my opinion. Anyone who is brilliant should be smart enough to not be a jerk - it's in his or her best interest to be perceived positively. Valuable jerk? sure. Now that sounds like a dilemma.

kjhughes• 14 years ago

I sense serious incongruity between the author's aspersions and the "jerk's" performance and accomplishments.

Before firing a brilliant team member with what the author perceives as an incorrigibly caustic attitude, he'd better be very sure there are not genuine issues in the organization that really ought to be resolved first.

6ren• 14 years ago

> The likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Roger Ailes have had no problem showing Brilliant Jerks the door

Any examples of that?

engtech• 14 years ago

I had a hard time reading this (like others did) because I felt like I was one of the brilliant jerks he is talking about.

But there is something to the effect of a "bad apple" on the barrel as a whole: http://www.inc.com/matthew-swyers/toss-the-bad-apple-employe...

From my own experience, the best way to diffuse me when I'm turning into the "brilliant jerk" is to give me some projects with some breathing room. I'm a lot less jerky when I having being through a serial stream of "jumping on the grenade" on critical/stressful projects that were about to explode.

MrMan2• 14 years ago

What you should do with this jerk - put him in charge.

joelrunyon2• 14 years ago

> He was the one doctor who dampened the unity with subtle but consistent complaining about why the group couldn’t do some things and shouldn’t do others.

1. Saying why you shouldn't do something is not complaining. If done correctly, it helps you avoid really big errors.

2. Unity is often overrated. If a company is "united" in making poor business decisions that are bad for the long-term health of the company and this "brilliant" guy is being a "jerk" for suggesting they do something else. I find "unity" as a goal sounds really nice, but when that replaces actual discussion, you end up with a very dangerous organization susceptible to self-deception and self-harm that go full speed ahead because they're "united".

I really don't like this advice at all. I think it might work for the smart guy who underperforms, but for the example the author quoted, I think this is terrible, terrible advice.

kamaal2• 14 years ago

This post reminds me of a story we studied in the school called 'Pied Piper'- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pied_Piper_of_Hamelin

What a horrible advice. This guy is basically asking you to make your employees sacrifice their whole lives to make your company successful. And then when you and your company actually make it big, mercilessly kick them out without their due deserved rewards.

This sort of thing creates the 'Zynga stories', where senior executives don't want the chef to get rich. Or that the hardworking programmer in his cubicle no matter how hardworking he is doesn't deserve to get rich. And no matter how lazy the senior executive is, by the virtue of his designation, big college degree status is automatically inclined to a better compensation.

This might work for a one of case. But on a longer is a disaster for the start up ecosystem. If these stories spread, no good guy will ever want to work for a start up.

chris_wot• 14 years ago

Sounds like the brilliant jerk was the one who wrote the article.

stevedekorte• 14 years ago

I don't have a strong position on this but wasn't Steve Jobs kicked out of Apple for roughly the same reasons? They thought he was too radical and mercurial to handle a larger company?

What do you do with the Brilliant Jerk?

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