cult boss offers more complex lessons. A difficult boss can be
challenging, picky, intimidating, arrogant, abrupt, and mercu-
rial. But at the same time he can inspire, provide vision, and oc-
casionally even care about you. A classic example of a difficult
boss was media mogul Robert Maxwell. A true visionary who
was discovered to be a crook after his mysterious death in 1991,
Maxwell admitted to all of the flaws listed above during a “60
Minutes” interview. He once fired his son for forgetting to pick
him up at the airport, and then rehired him six months later.
Anne Bryant told me of a difficult boss: “I worked for a
woman whom I admired, thought was fabulous, but she always
looked for the flaws in people, so she lost lots of good people.
She is exciting, brilliant, a visionary, and she really moves and
changes organization, but working for her is tough. I learned a
lot from her—on both the positive and negative sides. If you’re
strong, you can learn from bad bosses, but if you’re not strong,
it’s tough.”
Barbara Corday described both a bad boss and a difficult
one: “I think I learned some really important things from bad
leaders. It’s like having a parent where you say, ‘I’ll never treat
my children that way.’ ...I worked years ago in New York for a
man who was very abusive to people who worked for him—
physically as well as mentally. He would take a guy and throw
him up against a wall and yell at him. And then he would put an
extra $50 in the pay envelope. I did not see any loyalty or good
work coming out of that atmosphere. And I just went com-
pletely the other way.... My partner Barbara and I once
worked for a man, a very famous, talented producer, who was
unhappily married and had no particular interest in going
home at night. Well, of course, what that translated to was that
we wound up working terrible hours, well into the nights and
Moving Through Chaos