factor isn’t ego or gratuitous humiliation;
it’s vision.”
To prove his point, Kramer offers as
an example two exceptionally visionary
intimidators: former Motorola CEO Ed
Zander, whose business motto was “whack
yourself before somebody whacks you”;
and Miramax’s despised Harvey Wein-
stein, who used his “high-pressure tac-
tics” to help those around him reach “the
apex of their professional talents.” Wein-
stein’s hostile pyrotechnics were not bully-
ing, Kramer assures us, but “the calculated
sound and fury of a skillful intimidator.”
Nonetheless, even before more than
90 women came forward to accuse Wein-
stein of sexual assault and harassment, he
was one of the most notorious bullies in
an industry famous for them. One former
Weinstein employee told the Guardian
that scarcely a day went by “without him
publicly abusing someone... a waiter, a
colleague, a director, a driver. It was a hor-
rible feeling to be screamed at or ‘fired’ (he
threatened this multiple times a day). But
it was far worse to see him abuse someone
else. Fighting back didn’t work with him,
really, but you could intervene on some-
one else’s behalf and draw his fire. It was
like tending to a giant, belligerent, dis-
gusting baby.”
Be that as it may, so thorough is Kram-
er’s admiration for great intimidators that
he offers a series of tips to help ordinary
bossholes “possess a little ‘interior intim-
idator’ of their own.” The aspiring intimi-
dator’s toolkit must include an “aggressive
physical demeanor” as well as an arsenal of
“taunts and slurs to provoke victims.” Of
course, intimidators also “use anger and
rage to get their way,” so bossholes should
feel free to go ballistic from time to time.
But, cautions Kramer, “keep them guess-
ing” by punctuating the tantrums with pe-
riods of sullenness. And above all, crush
any remnants of compassion that smol-
der within you because it is precisely the
intimidator’s “absence of empathy” that
“opens up branches of the decision tree,
exposing options that other leaders might
reject.” True, intimidators “trample on
people’s feelings and set impossible stan-
dards.” But Kramer argues that his own re-
search shows that “great intimidators are
often magnets for the best and brightest...
because they inspire great performance.”
Well, OK. But here’s a pickle: To para-
phrase Jesus Christ, what shall it profit a
man if he inspires great performance but
loses his soul?“The mosT imporTanT person in any
company is the shareholder.”
So wrote the late, notorious “Chain-
saw” Al Dunlap in his 1997 book Mean
Business (that’s really what he called it!).
And in that simple statement lies the basis
for a substantial proportion of American
bossholery.
It wasn’t always so. Before the 1970s,
many CEOs took it for granted that it was
their responsibility to balance the inter-
ests of the company’s stakeholders. For in-
stance, in 1951, Frank Abrams, chairman of
Standard Oil of New Jersey, stated that the
“job of management” was “to maintain an
equitable and working balance among the
claims of the various directly affected in-
terest groups... stockholders, employees,
customers, and the public at large.”
Some economists call this philosophy
“stakeholder capitalism,” but over the
next three or four decades it gave way to
the “shareholder capitalism” favored by
bosshole CEOs. There are different the-
ories as to why it happened, but former
secretary of labor Robert Reich believes
much of the blame lies with the corpo-
rate raiders of the 1980s. These raiders
“began mounting unfriendly takeovers of
companies that could deliver higher re-
turns to their shareholders—if they aban-
doned their other stakeholders... fought
unions, cut workers’ pay or fired them, au-
tomated as many jobs as possible or moved
jobs abroad, shuttered factories, aban-
doned their communities, and squeezed
their customers.”
Over the past decade, however (and par-
ticularly the past five or so years), the focus
of corporate business has been returning to
stakeholders once more, much to the dis-STEVE JOBS
Business Insider
ran an article: “16
Examples of Steve
Jobs Being an
Unbelievable Jerk”ANNA WINTOUR
The Vogue editor’s
imperious ways
inspired The Devil
Wears PradaED ZANDER
When he took
over at Motorola,
he bemoaned
the company’s
“clogged arteries”