McCain and Palin Jokes

On my commute home last night, I came up with this whole little comedy routine about the McCain / Palin ticket. Unfortunately, I had no audience to appreciate it, because I don’t actually perform comedey, ant that’s because I’m really not funny. However, I wanted to capture some of the jokes and share them with the world. This is my gift to you about McCain Palin Obama economy Iraq depression politics hope undead meltdown housing lizard foreclosure financial pit bull security patriot rabies campaign election.

I think the McCain campain took him in the wrong direction at the start. I think they should tried to make McCain look less like a creepy old degnerate. Not more.

I mean, no one wins with the creepy old degenerate look.

Likewise, I think they should have gone another direction with Palin. In retrospect, there are probably better choices than “Psychotic bitch”.

Although lots of people do win with the “Psychotic bitch” look.

I don’t want to come down on one side or the other though. You should make up your own mind. There are two strong tickets this year. One is the inspiring black man who rose from nothing to attend Harvard, enter the Senate, and win against all odds to bring us a campaign of hope, and a vision of a different way for Washington to work. Or you can vote for the ghoulish lizard and the psychotic bitch.

I know I keep comparing McCain to the undead. And that’s not fair. But, come on.

I mean when you say McCain, the first thing to pop into your head is not the Swedish bikini team. The guy shouldn’t be president, he should be introducing horror segments on a late night TV show.

When you say McCain, the first thing that pops into my head is, “Creeeeeeeeeeeeeaak…. My friends, our next story is a horrible tale about limitless ambition heh heh heh heh heh”

With the baby boomers aging, it would make sense for them to identify with an older candidate. But still, no one wants to look in the mirror and see John McCain. If you looked in the mirror and saw Hilary Clinton, well, she’s holding up pretty well. But if I looked in the mirror and saw McCain, I wouldn’t wait. I’d just dial 911 right away.

And I don’t want to beat up on him for being old. That’s a natural thing, a part of the cycle of life. It’s just that in his case, there are dire consequences for the country of his being old, the worst of which are Sarah Palin.

I don’t worry so much about Palin’s lack of experience, because experience is something you gain. It’s being a Nazi that’s hard to shake.

I’m just waiting for Palin to start referring to America as the “Fatherland”.

But if McCain did leave office feet first, it could be really good to have a beauty queen as president. Maybe we could deport all the ugly people.

The thing is, with all the latent racism that’s coming up in this election, especially in the Democratic party, it’s kind of amazing that McCain is losing. You could get 60% of the vote simply by being white and having a body temperature above 65 degrees. Unfortunately, McCain only meets one of those criteria.

Bye Bye Smooth Dumb and Nasty For Good!

OK a quick update. Four months later, and I am enjoying my new team tremendously. Looking at my old post, I was right, and there were no more road bumps in my transition. The new team is smart — very smart — and very very busy. So I am having tons of fun. If anything, I’ve had to slow myself down. I have a tendency to over-commit.

But ya it was a tremendously good move, and I’m very, very happy with my new team.

Is Your Boss a Psychopath?

A comprehensive article on corporate psychopaths here:

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/96/open_boss.html

Is Your Boss a Psychopath?

By: Alan Deutschman

Odds are you’ve run across one of these characters in your career. They’re glib, charming, manipulative, deceitful, ruthless — and very, very destructive. And there may be lots of them in America’s corner offices.

One of the most provocative ideas about business in this decade so far surfaced in a most unlikely place. The forum wasn’t the Harvard Business School or one of those $4,000-a-head conferences where Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists search for the next big thing. It was a convention of Canadian cops in the far-flung province of Newfoundland. The speaker, a 71-year-old professor emeritus from the University of British Columbia, remains virtually unknown in the business realm. But he’s renowned in his own field: criminal psychology. Robert Hare is the creator of the Psychopathy Checklist. The 20-item personality evaluation has exerted enormous influence in its quarter-century history. It’s the standard tool for making clinical diagnoses of psychopaths — the 1% of the general population that isn’t burdened by conscience. Psychopaths have a profound lack of empathy. They use other people callously and remorselessly for their own ends. They seduce victims with a hypnotic charm that masks their true nature as pathological liars, master con artists, and heartless manipulators. Easily bored, they crave constant stimulation, so they seek thrills from real-life “games” they can win — and take pleasure from their power over other people.

On that August day in 2002, Hare gave a talk on psychopathy to about 150 police and law-enforcement officials. He was a legendary figure to that crowd. The FBI and the British justice system have long relied on his advice. He created the P-Scan, a test widely used by police departments to screen new recruits for psychopathy, and his ideas have inspired the testing of firefighters, teachers, and operators of nuclear power plants.

According to the Canadian Press and Toronto Sun reporters who rescued the moment from obscurity, Hare began by talking about Mafia hit men and sex offenders, whose photos were projected on a large screen behind him. But then those images were replaced by pictures of top executives from WorldCom, which had just declared bankruptcy, and Enron, which imploded only months earlier. The securities frauds would eventually lead to long prison sentences for WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers and Enron CFO Andrew Fastow.

“These are callous, cold-blooded individuals,” Hare said.

“They don’t care that you have thoughts and feelings. They have no sense of guilt or remorse.” He talked about the pain and suffering the corporate rogues had inflicted on thousands of people who had lost their jobs, or their life’s savings. Some of those victims would succumb to heart attacks or commit suicide, he said.

Then Hare came out with a startling proposal. He said that the recent corporate scandals could have been prevented if CEOs were screened for psychopathic behavior. “Why wouldn’t we want to screen them?” he asked. “We screen police officers, teachers. Why not people who are going to handle billions of dollars?”

It’s Hare’s latest contribution to the public awareness of “corporate psychopathy.” He appeared in the 2003 documentary The Corporation, giving authority to the film’s premise that corporations are “sociopathic” (a synonym for “psychopathic”) because they ruthlessly seek their own selfish interests — “shareholder value” — without regard for the harms they cause to others, such as environmental damage.

Is Hare right? Are corporations fundamentally psychopathic organizations that attract similarly disposed people? It’s a compelling idea, especially given the recent evidence. Such scandals as Enron and WorldCom aren’t just aberrations; they represent what can happen when some basic currents in our business culture turn malignant. We’re worshipful of top executives who seem charismatic, visionary, and tough. So long as they’re lifting profits and stock prices, we’re willing to overlook that they can also be callous, conning, manipulative, deceitful, verbally and psychologically abusive, remorseless, exploitative, self-delusional, irresponsible, and megalomaniacal. So we collude in the elevation of leaders who are sadly insensitive to hurting others and society at large.But wait, you say: Don’t bona fide psychopaths become serial killers or other kinds of violent criminals, rather than the guys in the next cubicle or the corner office? That was the conventional wisdom. Indeed, Hare began his work by studying men in prison. Granted, that’s still an unusually good place to look for the conscience-impaired. The average Psychopathy Checklist score for incarcerated male offenders in North America is 23.3, out of a possible 40. A score of around 20 qualifies as “moderately psychopathic.” Only 1% of the general population would score 30 or above, which is “highly psychopathic,” the range for the most violent offenders. Hare has said that the typical citizen would score a 3 or 4, while anything below that is “sliding into sainthood.”

On the broad continuum between the ethical everyman and the predatory killer, there’s plenty of room for people who are ruthless but not violent. This is where you’re likely to find such people as Ebbers, Fastow, ImClone CEO Sam Waksal, and hotelier Leona Helmsley. We put several big-name CEOs through the checklist, and they scored as “moderately psychopathic”; our quiz on page 48 lets you try a similar exercise with your favorite boss. And this summer, together with New York industrial psychologist Paul Babiak, Hare begins marketing the B-Scan, a personality test that companies can use to spot job candidates who may have an MBA but lack a conscience. “I always said that if I wasn’t studying psychopaths in prison, I’d do it at the stock exchange,” Hare told Fast Company. “There are certainly more people in the business world who would score high in the psychopathic dimension than in the general population. You’ll find them in any organization where, by the nature of one’s position, you have power and control over other people and the opportunity to get something.”

There’s evidence that the business climate has become even more hospitable to psychopaths in recent years. In pioneering long-term studies of psychopaths in the workplace, Babiak focused on a half-dozen unnamed companies: One was a fast-growing high-tech firm, and the others were large multinationals undergoing dramatic organizational changes — severe downsizing, restructuring, mergers and acquisitions, and joint ventures. That’s just the sort of corporate tumult that has increasingly characterized the U.S. business landscape in the last couple of decades. And just as wars can produce exciting opportunities for murderous psychopaths to shine (think of Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic), Babiak found that these organizational shake-ups created a welcoming environment for the corporate killer. “The psychopath has no difficulty dealing with the consequences of rapid change; in fact, he or she thrives on it,” Babiak claims. “Organizational chaos provides both the necessary stimulation for psychopathic thrill seeking and sufficient cover for psychopathic manipulation and abusive behavior.”

And you can make a compelling case that the New Economy, with its rule-breaking and roller-coaster results, is just dandy for folks with psychopathic traits too. A slow-moving old-economy corporation would be too boring for a psychopath, who needs constant stimulation. Its rigid structures and processes and predictable ways might stymie his unethical scheming. But a charge-ahead New Economy maverick — an Enron, for instance — would seem the ideal place for this kind of operator.But how can we recognize psychopathic types? Hare has revised his Psychopathy Checklist (known as the PCL-R, or simply “the Hare”) to make it easier to identify so-called subcriminal or corporate psychopaths. He has broken down the 20 personality characteristics into two subsets, or “factors.” Corporate psychopaths score high on Factor 1, the “selfish, callous, and remorseless use of others” category. It includes eight traits: glibness and superficial charm; grandiose sense of self-worth; pathological lying; conning and manipulativeness; lack of remorse or guilt; shallow affect (i.e., a coldness covered up by dramatic emotional displays that are actually playacting); callousness and lack of empathy; and the failure to accept responsibility for one’s own actions. Sound like anyone you know? (Corporate psychopaths score only low to moderate on Factor 2, which pinpoints “chronically unstable, antisocial, and socially deviant lifestyle,” the hallmarks of people who wind up in jail for rougher crimes than creative accounting.)

This view is supported by research by psychologists Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon at the University of Surrey, who interviewed and gave personality tests to 39 high-level British executives and compared their profiles with those of criminals and psychiatric patients. The executives were even more likely to be superficially charming, egocentric, insincere, and manipulative, and just as likely to be grandiose, exploitative, and lacking in empathy. Board and Fritzon concluded that the businesspeople they studied might be called “successful psychopaths.” In contrast, the criminals — the “unsuccessful psychopaths” — were more impulsive and physically aggressive.

The Factor 1 psychopathic traits seem like the playbook of many corporate power brokers through the decades. Manipulative? Louis B. Mayer was said to be a better actor than any of the stars he employed at MGM, able to turn on the tears at will to evoke sympathy during salary negotiations with his actors. Callous? Henry Ford hired thugs to crush union organizers, deployed machine guns at his plants, and stockpiled tear gas. He cheated on his wife with his teenage personal assistant and then had the younger woman marry his chauffeur as a cover. Lacking empathy? Hotel magnate Leona Helmsley shouted profanities at and summarily fired hundreds of employees allegedly for trivialities, like a maid missing a piece of lint. Remorseless? Soon after Martin Davis ascended to the top position at Gulf & Western, a visitor asked why half the offices were empty on the top floor of the company’s Manhattan skyscraper. “Those were my enemies,” Davis said. “I got rid of them.” Deceitful? Oil baron Armand Hammer laundered money to pay for Soviet espionage. Grandiosity? Thy name is Trump.

In the most recent wave of scandals, Enron’s Fastow displayed many of the corporate psychopath’s traits. He pressured his bosses for a promotion to CFO even though he had a shaky grasp of the position’s basic responsibilities, such as accounting and treasury operations. Suffering delusions of grandeur after just a little time on the job, Fastow ordered Enron’s PR people to lobby CFO magazine to make him its CFO of the Year. But Fastow’s master manipulation was a scheme to loot Enron. He set up separate partnerships, secretly run by himself, to engage in deals with Enron. The deals quickly made tens of millions of dollars for Fastow — and prettified Enron’s financials in the short run by taking unwanted assets off its books. But they left Enron with time bombs that would ultimately cause the company’s total implosion — and lose shareholders billions. When Enron’s scandals were exposed, Fastow pleaded guilty to securities fraud and agreed to pay back nearly $24 million and serve 10 years in prison.“Chainsaw” Al Dunlap might score impressively on the corporate Psychopathy Checklist too. What do you say about a guy who didn’t attend his own parents’ funerals? He allegedly threatened his first wife with guns and knives. She charged that he left her with no food and no access to their money while he was away for days. His divorce was granted on grounds of “extreme cruelty.” That’s the characteristic that endeared him to Wall Street, which applauded when he fired 11,000 workers at Scott Paper, then another 6,000 (half the labor force) at Sunbeam. Chainsaw hurled a chair at his human-resources chief, the very man who approved the handgun and bulletproof vest on his expense report. Dunlap needed the protection because so many people despised him. His plant closings kept up his reputation for ruthlessness but made no sense economically, and Sunbeam’s financial gains were really the result of Dunlap’s alleged book cooking. When he was finally exposed and booted, Dunlap had the nerve to demand severance pay and insist that the board reprice his stock options. Talk about failure to accept responsibility for one’s own actions.

While knaves such as Fastow and Dunlap make the headlines, most horror stories of workplace psychopathy remain the stuff of frightened whispers. Insiders in the New York media business say the publisher of one of the nation’s most famous magazines broke the nose of one of his female sales reps in the 1990s. But he was considered so valuable to the organization that the incident didn’t impede his career.

Most criminals — whether psychopathic or not — are shaped by poverty and often childhood abuse as well. In contrast, corporate psychopaths typically grew up in stable, loving families that were middle class or affluent. But because they’re pathological liars, they tell romanticized tales of rising from tough, impoverished backgrounds. Dunlap pretended that he grew up as the son of a laid-off dockworker; in truth, his father worked steadily and raised his family in suburban comfort. The corporate psychopaths whom Babiak studied all went to college, and a couple even had PhDs. Their ruthless pursuit of self-interest was more easily accomplished in the white-collar realm, which their backgrounds had groomed them for, rather than the criminal one, which comes with much lousier odds.

Psychopaths succeed in conventional society in large measure because few of us grasp that they are fundamentally different from ourselves. We assume that they, too, care about other people’s feelings. This makes it easier for them to “play” us. Although they lack empathy, they develop an actor’s expertise in evoking ours. While they don’t care about us, “they have an element of emotional intelligence, of being able to see our emotions very clearly and manipulate them,” says Michael Maccoby, a psychotherapist who has consulted for major corporations.

Psychopaths are typically very likable. They make us believe that they reciprocate our loyalty and friendship. When we realize that they were conning us all along, we feel betrayed and foolish. “People see sociopathy in their personal lives, and they don’t have a clue that it has a label or that others have encountered it,” says Martha Stout, a psychologist at the Harvard Medical School and the author of the recent best-seller The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us (Broadway Books, 2005). “It makes them feel crazy or alone. It goes against our intuition that a small percentage of people can be so different from the rest of us — and so evil. Good people don’t want to believe it.”

Of course, cynics might say that it can be an advantage to lack a conscience. That’s probably why major investors installed Dunlap as the CEO of Sunbeam: He had no qualms about decimating the workforce to impress Wall Street. One reason outside executives get brought into troubled companies is that they lack the emotional stake in either the enterprise or its people. It’s easier for them to act callously and remorselessly, which is exactly what their backers want. The obvious danger of the new B-Scan test for psychopathic tendencies is that companies will hire or promote people with high scores rather than screen them out. Even Babiak, the test’s codeveloper, says that while “a high score is a red flag, sometimes middle scores are okay. Perhaps you don’t want the most honest and upfront salesman.”

Indeed, not every aberrant boss is necessarily a corporate psychopath. There’s another personality that’s often found in the executive suite: the narcissist. While many psychologists would call narcissism a disorder, this trait can be quite beneficial for top bosses, and it’s certainly less pathological than psychopathy. Maccoby’s book The Productive Narcissist: The Promise and Perils of Visionary Leadership (Broadway Books, 2003) portrays the narcissistic CEO as a grandiose egotist who is on a mission to help humanity in the abstract even though he’s often insensitive to the real people around him. Maccoby counts Apple’s Steve Jobs, General Electric’s Jack Welch, Intel’s Andy Grove, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, and Southwest Airlines’ Herb Kelleher as “productive narcissists,” or PNs. Narcissists are visionaries who attract hordes of followers, which can make them excel as innovators, but they’re poor listeners and they can be awfully touchy about criticism. “These people don’t have much empathy,” Maccoby says. “When Bill Gates tells someone, ‘That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,’ or Steve Jobs calls someone a bozo, they’re not concerned about people’s feelings. They see other people as a means toward their ends. But they do have a sense of changing the world — in their eyes, improving the world. They build their own view of what the world should be and get others recruited to their vision. Psychopaths, in contrast, are only interested in self.”

Maccoby concedes that productive narcissists can become “drunk with power” and turn destructive. The trick, he thinks, is to pair a productive narcissist with a “productive obsessive,” or conscientious, control-minded manager. Think of Grove when he was matched with chief operating officer Craig Barrett, Gates with president Steve Ballmer, Kelleher with COO Colleen Barrett, and Oracle’s Larry Ellison with COO Ray Lane and CFO Jeff Henley. In his remarkably successful second tour of duty at Apple, Jobs has been balanced by steady, competent behind-the-scenes players such as Timothy Cook, his executive vice president for sales and operations.

But our culture’s embrace of narcissism as the hallmark of admired business leaders is dangerous, Babiak maintains, since “individuals who are really psychopaths are often mistaken for narcissists and chosen by the organization for leadership positions.” How does he distinguish the difference between the two types? “In the case of a narcissist, everything is me, me, me,” Babiak explains. “With a psychopath, it’s ‘Is it thrilling, is it a game I can win, and does it hurt others?’ My belief is a psychopath enjoys hurting others.”

Intriguingly, Babiak believes that it’s extremely unlikely for an entrepreneurial founder-CEO to be a corporate psychopath because the company is an extension of his own ego — something he promotes rather than plunders. “The psychopath has no allegiance to the company at all, just to self,” Babiak says. “A psychopath is playing a short-term parasitic game.” That was the profile of Fastow and Dunlap — guys out to profit for themselves without any concern for the companies and lives they were wrecking. In contrast, Jobs and Ellison want their own companies to thrive forever — indeed, to dominate their industries and take over other fields as well. “An entrepreneurial founder-CEO might have a narcissistic tendency that looks like psychopathy,” Babiak says. “But they have a vested interest: Their identity is wrapped up with the company’s existence. They’re loyal to the company.” So these types are ruthless not only for themselves but also for their companies, their extensions of self.

The issue is whether we will continue to elevate, celebrate, and reward so many executives who, however charismatic, remain indifferent to hurting other people. Babiak says that while the first line of defense against psychopaths in the workplace is screening job candidates, the second line is a “culture of openness and trust, especially when the company is undergoing intense, chaotic change.”

Europe is far ahead of the United States in trying to deal with psychological abuse and manipulation at work. The “antibullying” movement in Europe has produced new laws in France and Sweden. Harvard’s Stout suggests that the relentlessly individualistic culture of the United States contributes a lot to our problems. She points out that psychopathy has a dramatically lower incidence in certain Asian cultures, where the heritage has emphasized community bonds rather than glorified self-interest. “If we continue to go this way in our Western culture,” she says, “evolutionarily speaking, it doesn’t end well.”

The good news is that we can do something about corporate psychopaths. Scientific consensus says that only about 50% of personality is influenced by genetics, so psychopaths are molded by our culture just as much as they are born among us. But unless American business makes a dramatic shift, we’ll get more Enrons — and deserve them.

Alan Deutschman is a Fast Company senior writer based in San Francisco.

 

Smooth, Dumb and Nasty Return! Or try to!

OK so after Dumb wrote me out of the project schedule, they realized that Dumb couldn’t finish the project by himself on time.  So Smooth just told me we were going to have to delay my transition so I could help them get done on time.
… wow. just wow.

First, even if they hadn’t sabotaged my work, I am appalled at just the sheer stupidity of writing me out of the schedule without telling me, then coming to ask me to bail them out.

BTW I anticipated they would scuttle my work, so I made a good, solid product, but I didn’t spend a whole lot of time on it.  I am still really happy with how it came out, and I may reuse pieces of it later. It’s another example of the “engine-interface” model, with a transparent proxy that drops messages in a JMS queue while the other side listens for incoming messages.

Of course, they are being “shrewd” and they haven’t yet told me they scuttled the work I did for them. But when I look at the schedule, there’s nothing in there that mentions my piece or the required integration work or anything. I think they are keeping quiet so that they can always say I’m wrong if I make a fuss.

So anyway, I went to my new boss and to the guy in HR who’s been extremely helpful in this transition and let them know I was … ah … unhappy about delaying the transition. Basically, I let him know that wasn’t going to happen. So my boss talked to Smooth, and Smooth backed off — nasty little weasel — and then the HR guy talked to both Smooth and Smooth’s boss about the situation.

Smooth is pretty nasty, though, and he may take one more pot shot at me before the end of the month. I’m not worried about it, though, because it will just call attention to his failure to plan, and it will escalate and get pretty nasty. The good news is that it’s extremely unlikely that they’ll fire me over this one incident, and this is after all a really small thing. As long as I’m nice to that nasty, ass-sucking little weasel, at least publicly, things will just work out.

I’m still just kind of amazed those guys can be that malicious and stupid at the same time.

Anyway, I’ve announced to everyone on my new team, cheerfully, that I’ve cleared my plate, and starting Tuesday (after the long weekend), I am working for them. HR can work out the details of the official transfer when it’s convenient for them.

Bye Bye Smooth, Dumb and Nasty

Well now I am getting the silent treatment from Smooth, Dumb, and Nasty. Hooray! Dumb has written, and then re-written, the project schedule for the project I’m supposedly a part of, and it looks like my piece has been written out of it. Of course, I only know that by going in to source control and looking at the schedule. I haven’t heard from Dumb in weeks. Which is annoying just because of the lack of professionalism and raw stupidity of running a technical team that way. I mean, they paid for the hours that I put in to that effort. But it’s also a huge relief, because it’s an acknowledgment that I am finally free and clear of those sociopathic f-holes.

Whew! What a relief! Bye bye suck-hole jerks!

My Sister

My Sister killed herself last fall, right before my parents visited for Thanksgiving.

There’s no mystery as to the “why” — that’s the easy part. She had adult-onset bipolar disorder, and was going with only minimal treatment. She was one of the unlucky 20% who lost the final battle to the disease.

Part of the problem was her abusive, psychopathic husband. He was systematically demeaning her, cutting her down and arguing with her in front of the children, and isolating her from the treatment she had been receiving. So you can’t really say that he put the knife in her, but he was terribly abusive toward someone who was in desperate trouble.

True to form, now he is closing off access to the children from my parents. They played a large part in helping with the family. Besides monetary support, mom would go and stay with them sometimes for a month, sleeping in their dining room, because she wanted to help my sister, and she loved being with the kids so much.

We’re encouraging Mom to talk to some attorneys in Mississippi about grandparent visitation, because Brian is cutting off access to the children.

I think it’s so ironic that here I am on this blog ranting about psychopaths, I am so sensitive to their presence in the numerous places I’ve worked, and meanwhile my sister ends up in an abusive marriage married to one.

Today for the first time, I think I saw her point of view. And for the first time, I don’t disagree with her decision as sharply as I have before. Here’s what she was facing:

+ A very difficult struggle with her mental illness for the rest of her life.

+ A nasty divorce from her abusive husband, in which she may have lost custody of the children because of her illness.

+ Being stuck in Mississippi forever because of child custody issues — basically, both parents would have to find work in the same state at the same time to get out of that place.

+ The spectre of physical abuse or possibly even murder from her increasingly abusive and threatening husband — which she mentioned in the last week of her life.

+ The difficulties of raising two young children when she was severely depressed.

+ A disintegrating relationship with her youngest daughter, again because of her mental state. She had been such a wonderful, loving mother, but under the stress of spousal abuse and severe depression, she saw her daughter acting out increasingly aggressively.

In the end, she probably thought that she had no options, and felt she couldn’t care for the kids even if she got to keep custody of them in a nasty divorce.

I think she was discounting a few things, such as the help she could have received from us, how much more effective she would have been outside the influence of her husband’s abuse, and finally, that alive she would have been around to see them and be with them whatever her circumstances.

I miss you, Beth. And I’m so sorry you got to the place you did. I wish you were still here, resting in Mom and Dad’s house while we thought through how to help you next.

To those…

I just read (well skimmed) a really cool article on the internet:

http://antaiji.dogen-zen.de/eng/kodo-sawaki-to-you.shtml

I thought it would be fun to extract the questions from this, and answer them how I would today.  Then later I can look at the answers, and see what I think then.

More later.

Cloverfield Predictions — How Did I Do?

OK so I saw the movie, and it rocked. I really enjoyed it. Now I’m going to take a moment to take a look at my predictions and see how I did.

For this, I am taking only what we learned in the movie. There is a manga being printed in Japan that suggests, for example, that the monster was towed behind the Tag freighter. Which suggests that Tag drug the thing to New York. But that is still outside the movie, so it doesn’t count.

OK here goes.

—–

[P] The Chuai station was established to exploit a deep-sea region inhabited by extremophiles (i.e. hardy little buggers) that lived in the deep trenches. They found “deep sea nectar”, which is otherwise known as MONSTER POOP. The monster who produces this poop, and also creates a whole ecosystem around it, turned out to be bigger and more bad-tempered than the Tag engineers anticipated.

[A] Not addressed in movie.

[P] After a year of putting up with drilling and bombardment the ocean floor with sonar, this very large extremophile rose from the depths to tell them to knock it off. This it did with a distinct lack of subtlety. Then it followed the sound or sonar of a passing tanker, which it followed to the Big Apple.

[A] Not addressed in movie.

[P] It found the Big Apple, and its residents, to be very tasty. It probably thinks of them as “above sea nectar”.

[A] hehehe “above sea nectar” — I am funny

[P] Satellite parts? Coincidental.

[A] Not addressed in movie

[P] And Slusho? SLUSHO IS… MONSTER POOP!

[A] Not addressed in movie

[P] because of survival in a deep-sea trench, the monster probably burrows and has access to either volcanic vents or some sort of geothermal heat. This gives it an intimate relationship with natural gasses and heat, which above water produce FIRE and lots of it.

[A] BZZZZZZT! Nope. But the Air Force sure generated a lot of fire

[P] the monster is norished by fire

[A] er… BZZT! Didn’t look like it anyway.

[P] the monster is able to create fire in various ways, including having the little lifeforms that live on it produce sources of fire

[A] BZZZZT! Unless that is a hidden superpower the monster has

[P] because of its ability to survive in incredibly harsh conditions, it is really, really hard to kill

[A] DING! Yay my first correct answer!

[P] because it has to move a huge mass through water, above water it can move surprizingly fast and with unbelievable power

[A] Er… DING! It didn’t move super-fast, but it still moved fast enough to sneak up on Hud.

[P] the big thing is amphipious (for some reason) and is closer to a frog or a turtle than a reptile

[A] DING! At least, it looked more like a big shell-less turtle than a big lizard. It didn’t have scales, that I could see, anyway.

[P] the thing has two arms and two legs;

[A] well OK it had that little pair of extra arms

[P] its armspan is very wide, the same as its overall length.

[A] DING! Nailed it!

[P] It is incredibly hunched over, and walks primarily like an animal on all 4s, but can rear up and use its arms to grab things (like helicopters)

[A] DING! I win!

[P] The thing has a huge, triangular face with swivel eyes and a huge gaping mouth with big fangs that would be effective in eating whales

[A] BZZZT! OK the head was round. But it could easily eat whales.

[P] It does rub on buildings and knock off smaller creatures (i.e. I think that rumor is credible)

[A] DING!

[P] Marlena explodes, but literally, like in a big fireball

[A] BZZZZZT!

[P] The monster does something to Manhattan, like cover it in monster poop, that leaves it uninhabitable at the end of the movie.

[A] BZZZZZT! But still, the monster causes the Air Force to level Manhattan, so I was sort of right.

[P] Well …even more uninhabitable than it is now.

[A] DING! Manhattan is currently uninhabitable by humans.

[P] At one point, the monster seems to die and we get a close-up of its face as it lies in the street. But then it comes back to life (i.e. I think that rumor is credible)

[A] BZZZZZZT! Although it does pop out of that cloud.

[P] Ooooh… I just read a good post, so I am going to go with it. The monster evolves during the movie from a very blobby sea creature to a more well-defined, dangerous land creature 

[A] BZZZZZT! Although that is a really cool idea.

[P] The thing eats whales. That’s why it has fangs and arms, and is amphibious. So it can surface and grab them.

[A] Not addressed in the film, but it certainly could eat a whale, if it grabbed ahold of one.

So how did I do overall? Well, after doing a statistical adjustment for the size of the sample and the amount of the initial data set, spread out over the observation base and controlled by the participants, my score is:

Score: 95% correct! (adjusted)

I have to say, I am pretty good.

Bully Bosses Article

There’s a really excellent article on bullies in the workplace at CIO magazine, and I want to capture a copy of it here so I’ll have it for a while.

http://www.cio.com/article/131400/How_to_Deal_With_Bully_Bosses

How to Deal With Bully Bosses

Do you have a bad manager? Someone who makes your life miserable all week by criticizing your every move? Experts offer their tips on handling bully and toxic bosses.

By Bob Weinstein

August 17, 2007 — CIO — Is your boss a tyrant of Machiavellian proportions? If it makes you feel better, you’re not alone. According to a study by the Employment Law Alliance, almost half of all employees have been targeted by a bully boss.

The study also revealed the following:

• 81 percent of bullies are managers.
• 50 percent of bullies are women and 50 percent are men.
• 84 percent of targets are women.
• 82 percent of targets ultimately lost their job.
• 95 percent of bullying is witnessed.

Do you have a boss who is off the wall—we’re talking certifiably nuts? If it’s any consolation, take comfort in knowing that you have more company than you can imagine. The simple truth is that bully or tyrant bosses can be found in abundance. Unfortunately, the majority can’t legally be institutionalized. Many should not be bosses.

Tyrannical behavior comes in all forms. There are bosses who are mind-controlling abusers, manic-depressive and psychotic. There are obnoxious bully bosses who rule by intimidation, insist on getting their way and fly off the handle easily. They treat subordinates like children and seldom ask for anyone’s input. There are also predator bosses, a term that is explained in management consultant Harvey Hornstein’s book, Brutal Bosses and Their Prey (Penguin Putnam), in which he defines two species of tyrannical bosses: “The Conqueror” and “The Manipulator.”

Conqueror bosses prey on employees’ weaknesses. They find great thrills in treating the workplace like a battlefield. Once they sense an employee’s soft spot, they pounce on it. The unsuspecting victim doesn’t stand a chance.

Manipulator bosses are the smoothest of bullies. They fear becoming less valued if their underlings get any recognition for exemplary work. Manipulator bosses are backstabbers who’ll go to frightening lengths to look good to their superiors.

Related Link

The Boss and You: A Survival Guide

So what makes lunatic bosses act the way they do? Brian Stern, president of Shaker Consulting Group, a management consulting firm in Cleveland, contends that tyrannical behavior often stems from bosses not knowing what they’re doing. A false assumption is thinking that bosses actually know how to manage people. Mention the word “boss” and we immediately think that the person has some special abilities or training. There are rules and training programs for almost every conceivable job, from sanitation engineer to nuclear physicist, but no set curriculum teaches you how to be a boss. An obvious way to compensate for a lack of skills is to be tough and unyielding. You stand a better chance of being left alone and unquestioned this way.

Yet training alone won’t turn a crazy boss into a sane manager. Whatever category your crazy boss fits into, the big question is whether you can work with him or her.

Tyrannical bosses come in one of two packages. “The first is the hard-nosed, tough, demanding perfectionist,” says Stern. “They can be difficult to work with, but they will listen to reason because they’re all about doing the best job they can. They also know that talented people make things happen. But they can drive you nuts trying to achieve goals.”

The second type, however, is even more difficult to work with, says Stern. “They are unyielding control freaks and have a total disregard for the facts. They demand that things be done their way.”

How to handle an off-the-wall boss

If you feel compelled to improve your situation so that you can at least coexist with your crazy boss, Stern suggests tactfully talking to the tyrant. Take extreme care, and use diplomacy when broaching the subject, he advises. “Don’t take an accusatory tone,” he says. “Instead, put the burden on yourself. Begin by outlining the problem, and suggest ways you and your boss can work together.”

A safer strategy is to lie low and stay out of the way of the tyrant boss. Do your job well, and avoid confrontations at all costs.

Only you can decide what will be the best solution, Stern adds. Whatever you do, remember that no job is worth enduring constant misery five days a week—not to mention obsessing about pending torture come Monday.

“I’m not going to take it any longer!”

Yet Robert Mueller, labor attorney and author of Bullying Bosses: A Survivor’s Guide (bullyingbosses.com), says you don’t have to take a bully boss’s constant abuse—and he doesn’t endorse copping out by finding another job.

Mueller contends that all victims of workplace bullying can become what he calls “workplace warriors” and use self-defense strategies that can restore power, dignity and options to the bullied employee.

The more you know about your despotic boss, the better you’ll be able to handle him.

There are many types of bully bosses. Mueller has identified seven types. Any of the following strike a responsive chord?

1. Subtle bullies: They torment their targets with quiet but piercing techniques.
2. Abusive bullies: These bosses hound a target employee without mercy.
3. Crude bullies: These people throw their weight around loudly and physically.
4. Raging bullies: These people intimidate everyone in the vicinity with their out-of-control anger.
5. Echo bullies: Not normally abusive, they mimic bullying behavior with their subordinates.
6. Ghost bullies: These bosses guide, mentor and supervise lower-level bosses in bullying techniques and tactics.
7. Satellite bullies: These are people of stature who undermine the target by contributing to someone else’s bullying.

Preparing for battle

Before you march into battle, Mueller offers some observations about bully bosses:

Personal confrontations with bullies are almost never productive.

Management-team members interpret any confrontation an employee might have with a boss as also being a confrontation with them, and without well-documented proof of a pattern of behavior, they will likely view the employee as the problem.

If bullies notice you’re ducking them, they will not see this as sensible avoidance, but as cowering behavior.

Don’t be afraid to make eye contact with your bully boss.

Don’t mistakenly think you can defuse a bully by getting personal and showing your human side. Bullies not only don’t appreciate the personal side of others, they don’t tolerate it. Details of your personal, spiritual or emotional life are weapons in your antagonist’s hands.

Don’t try and enlist the help of your HR department. HR can be the chilliest place any employee can visit, and also one of the most dangerous. HR’s allegiance is to the employer—and its goal is protecting the employer from legal claims. Approach rarely, with caution, and only when fully prepared.

Ready to go one-on-one with your tyrant boss?

Mueller offers 10 strategies:

1. Approach your bullying problem like a work project. Be methodical in how you behave, perform, document and strategize. Take notes after an incident. Try to stay unemotional. Even though he or she is trying to make you think the opposite, it is the bully who has a serious personal and professional problem, not you.

2. Be a workplace warrior. Even if you plan to put out feelers for other jobs, dedicate yourself to vanquishing your abuser, not being a victim.

3. Sweat the small stuff. Document even the smallest incidents, which often become the most important, illustrating a pattern of bullying that might not otherwise be apparent. Teasing counts. Sarcasm counts. Ignoring you or criticizing you counts. A very public glare or silent treatment counts.

4. Don’t let yourself get isolated. Every day, pick out someone you haven’t talked to for a while. Have a brief but focused conversation. Bullies work hard to alienate targets from their coworkers. Don’t let that happen to you.

Related Link

The Boss and You: A Survival Guide

5. Display self-esteem and broadcast a positive attitude. Pay attention to how your appearance—such as hair and clothes—is perceived by others. Make your personal space an oasis of calm and taste.

6. Try to stay in safe spots. Your abuser is less likely to attack when you are around other supervisors, known allies, particularly upright employees, and customers or other outsiders of importance to the employer. Make a list of those people and places.

7. During a bullying situation, excuse yourself. Don’t beat a hasty retreat, and don’t leave the building; tell your abuser that you’re late for an appointment with HR, for example. Or casually excuse yourself to use the restroom. Never enter the restroom if you are being pursued by a bully.

8. During an attack, try distracting your abuser. Pick up something physical—as long at it’s not a threatening item—such as a critical file that needs the bully’s attention or a note with an important phone number that needs to be called. Sometimes a simple distraction is enough to get him or her to stop.

9. Protect your personal information. Tell bullies as little as possible about your life, family, friends, hobbies, interests, religion and so on. Information about you gives them power.

10. Hold your cards close to the vest. As you’re building a case against a bully boss, the less you talk about your story to others at work, the better. Controlling what you say, when you say it and to whom needs to be part of your overall, well-organized strategy.

My boss is not a bully, he’s toxic!

Another variation of the tyrant or bully boss is the toxic boss, a term that has been around for a number of years. For those saddled with toxic bosses, there is actually a website called toxicboss.com and even a book about them, The Allure of Toxic Leaders: Why We Follow Destructive Bosses and Corrupt Politicians and How We Can Survive Them (Oxford) by Jean Lipman-Blumen. Toxic bosses are everywhere, according to Lipman-Blumen. Many are accomplished and extremely successful. Some are working for or running well-known companies. Others are geniuses who created breakthrough technology. On your first meeting, they can be well-poised and ingratiating, and can seem like they’d make great bosses, but that changes quickly once you start working for them. What you thought would be a dream job turns into a nightmare.

“Toxic leadership seems to be an equal-opportunity career path,” she observes. Even though we’re supposedly smarter and more psychologically tuned in than we were a few decades ago, “we continue to tolerate—even prefer and sometimes seek out—toxic leaders who degrade our lives and diminish our happiness.”

Toxic leaders are everywhere, and they’re not going away. “We see them in every arena: business, politics, religion, education, athletics,” says Lipman-Blumen.

Technology industries are rife with toxic managers, especially brilliant, warped geeks responsible for creating breakthrough technology.

Identifying toxic bosses

Unfortunately, toxic bosses are hard to spot before you’re hired. The reason is that many have Jekyll-and-Hyde personalities, says Lipman-Blumen. But if a sixth sense tells you that all is not kosher with this person, or that he is too good to be true or is unconsciously gnashing his teeth, do some homework and speak to employees or former employees. Unfortunately, few of us are going to act on our instincts.

What can you expect from toxic bosses once you’re unlucky enough to be working for them?

Ready?

Lipman-Blumen lists common destructive behaviors:

• Leaving employees worse off than they found them by undermining, demeaning and terrorizing them.
• Consciously feeding their employees illusions that enhance the leader’s power and impair the employee’s capacity to act independently.
• Playing to the basest fears and needs of the employees.
• Stifling constructive criticism and teaching supporters—sometimes by threats and authoritarianism—to comply with, rather than question, the leader’s judgment and actions.
• Failing to nurture other leaders, including their own successors.
• Maliciously setting constituents against one another.
• Identifying scapegoats and inciting others to castigate them.
• Ignoring or promoting incompetence, cronyism and corruption.

Can anything be done? You’re playing with fire if you intend to fly solo and confront your lunatic boss. “Forget heroics,” she says. If you feel compelled to right the situation, Lipman-Blumen advises putting together a coalition. There is strength in numbers—or at least, you hope so.

“There are probably many others who share your concerns, but feel as lonely and isolated as you do,” adds Lipman-Blumen. “Get them together and plan your strategy.”

But even then, she cautions that you’re walking a precarious line.

Trying to straighten out a crazy boss is like trying to soothe a starving cheetah that’s about to consume you for dinner. But if you’ve got guts and a sense of adventure, why not have it out with him? You’ll certainly feel better about yourself —and you may be surprised by the results.

© 2007 CXO Media Inc.

http://www.cio.com/article/131400/How_to_Deal_With_Bully_Bosses/1

Not as funny as I think I am?

I’ve always said that I am not as funny as I think I am.

Of course, I was just joking. But what if it’s true?