4 ms·

Ask HN: Ever met a psychopathic CEO?

• IndianAstronaut 10y ago
  Not a CEO, but I am currently dealing with a very vindictive and petty VP. Absolutely no empathy or thought for others. Brings similar people on board her team and they run amock making the lives of their subordinates or others that deal with them miserable. The lower end managers are blatantly self centered, but the higher up you go, the shit just gets more polish. Capital One has been quite the nightmare.
  • unixhero 10y ago
    Isnt't always like this?
• jankedeen 10y ago
  I've met a couple who are purposefully overbearing and intolerant.
• throwawaypr 10y ago
  I worked for a YC company whose CEO 100% fit the bill.
• hellofunk 10y ago
  I think you are asking the wrong question. It should be, have you ever met a CEO who was not a psychopath? The answer to this question is most definitely Yes, but the question remains the proper one.
  • da02 10y ago
    > have you ever met a CEO who was not a psychopath? Thanks for pointing this out.
  • zhte415 10y ago
    Yes. While having an obsessive desire to deliver <thing> be it service or product to customer, they focus on their people, making sure everyone feels valued and fulfilled. In a personal context, often quite shy.
• mrlyc 10y ago
  Oh yes. I used to work with one who wouldn't let the programmers print anything. He once stormed into the programming room after someone called and asked to leave a message for one of the programmers. "In my next company," he yelled, "there will be no phone system!" He also bragged about taking a whole year to pay a bill. Creative accounting was used to calculate my wages, something I didn't realise until after I had left as there were no payslips.
  • taway_1212 10y ago
    I'm not sure it's psychopathy. Maybe the guy can function properly around his family and friends, and just has this idea of business world being "dog eat dog". Some of the worst German war criminals during WWII seemed to have a decent family life etc. - they were just great at compartmentalizing.
    • mathgeek 10y ago
      Might be venturing into the difference between a psychopath and a sociopath.
      • dsacco 10y ago
        There is no difference, because both refer to what is clinically considered antisocial personality disorder. Both terms are too colloquially loaded and ill-defined to be very useful outside of the clinical context. People use "psychopath" to describe people across a wide spectrum, from asshole to antisocial personality disorder. There has been a misconception that sociopaths are psychopaths without violent tendencies but with the same lack of empathy, but there's really no rigor in any of it.
        • shubb 10y ago
          It's interesting - masks of sanity was an attempt to explain low level serial criminals who were unable to hold a life together. Those folks have little in common with a successful but amoral ceo, or even our powertripping middle managers. For one thing they are in jail most of the time. In life you see folks with different abilities, like the ability to make people like them, or bullshit thier way out of situations. And sometimes those people also happen to be assholes. I'm not sure diagnosis is the right approach here. Maybe a better approach would be to tackle the problems, which seem to be the same workers rights issues government regulations have tried to tackle for a long time. But this is Silicon Valley where you too will be rich after IPO if you just forget all that right. This is Holywood, back in the bad old days, just without the unions. The trouble with diagnosis as a moral judgement is that it detracts from thier use in describing ill people and how we should regard them. If your boss is evil because he's a sociopath, what about jack cheating on his wife during a bipolar manic phase? Neither of them can help it. And your boss is evil. It also shows the way medical diagnosis which had a specific meaning, and applied to people we don't meet, get mapped to perfectly well people who we do. Once a child, who would have been in need of guidance a decade before, is told they are a psychopath and taken from main stream schooling, there will be little help for them.
• baccheion 10y ago
  A new study suggests 1 in 5 CEOs are Psychopaths (up from 4%).
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• throwawaycereal 10y ago
  The CEO at my company is nice, handsome, charming and as far as I know I've never seen him actually be angry at someone or anything like that. I just think something feels off about him. The enthusiasm doesn't feel 100% genuine. I don't get this feeling from anyone else in the company. But hopefully I am not blinded by "knowing" this about CEOs from HN/startup scene/roumours etc. --- Worst part? I feel like I'd like to learn from it / about it. It is a really fascinating topic for me. I almost kind of envy it somehow.
• kerouanton 10y ago
  Sure, met one. He was coming from sales, and kept selling much more than teams could deliver. At one point that began to generate burn-outs and resignations, but he didn't even notice and change his goals. the issue was that most of the time he was charming, but if you were able to check the small details (as he never came to see the teams even to say good morning, unless he had something to ask or someone to blame), you'd quickly understand the risk of being in the team.
• johnwheeler 10y ago
  I worked with a startup CEO who'd frequently reply to Marc Andresssen's tweets and carry on Twitter conversations with such billionaires/tech moguls because he felt he was in their league (he wasn't). Even though he would get little or no responses, he'd talk to his employees about the time he and Marc had a conversation regarding such and such business matter.
  • Nomentatus 10y ago
    I'm gonna go with the character disorder of narcissism on this one, though that can certainly combine with psychopathy.
• Nomentatus 10y ago
  I remember one company that probably had two different layers of psycopaths in management, with the result that employees ended up with three different strict rule books to follow, one of them unwritten; each inconsistent with the other. The resulting triple-bind left every action by a psychopathic manager justifiable, no surprise there. The business ultimately failed when it tried to branch out to new cities. It turns out that psychopaths aren't very good judges of people (probably that empathy thing, again) so they uniformly hired thieves who flattered them and then skimmed cash until the branches flatlined. I'm not sure whether they started as management or sales, but had risen to management.
• andrei_says_ 10y ago
  Not a direct answer to your question but Pieter Hintjens' Psychopath Code addresses this exact topic and offers ways to identify and contain such relationships. http://hintjens.com/blog:_psychopaths http://hintjens.com/blog:_psychopaths
  • da02 10y ago
    Thanks for this link.