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What Should Start-Ups Do With the Brilliant Jerk?
First time accepted submitter glowend writes "Cliff Oxford writes in the New York Times 'I define Brilliant Jerks as specialized, high-producing performers. They are not, however, brilliant business people, and that is what companies need during periods of rapid growth. There are a lot of hurdles to cross when companies move from start-up to growth, including dealing with chaos and changes in culture. But the biggest hurdle is dealing with the human factor — how you move, shift and replace people as the company grows into the next level of success.' So how do you make the best use of the Brilliant Jerk as your company grows?"
as you would have them do unto you.
brilliant business people are the opposite of productive.
Jerk in any way shape or form is not needed in any business.
Worked for Apple Computer Inc.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Some types of autism or personality disorders make people come across as "jerks" to other more extroverted people. If someone is just quiet or short with you, it doesn't necessarily mean they're a jerk.
The article has it right
"So what’s the right answer? Get rid of the Brilliant Jerk as fast as you possibly can"
First, the brilliant jerk isn't as brilliant as he or others think he is. Often, it is right after your superstar leaves that people covering his work find out about the shortcuts he took.
Second, his positive contribution will stay stead, but his negative contribution will grow proportionally to the size of your company and the number of people he works with.
Third, the longer he stays the bigger headache it will be to get rid of him.
Fourth, be sure he realy is a jerk and cannot be reasoned with.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I define Brilliant Jerks as specialized, high-producing performers. They are not, however, brilliant business people
Seriously, he's never met a brilliant jerk MBA business guy? He needs to get out more. Many business types are jerks, some are even very talented and smart.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Why would you ask that here? What would slashdotters know about being jerks?
I can think of no better way to inspire under-performers in a growing company than to jettison the worker who has been a superhero to date in a small company. This article is baffling to me and I don't understand why the author thinks dealing with super-performers should be different based on the company size. And the premise that it is unreasonable for the guy who constantly pulls backsides of others out of the fire to become a little irritated is odd.
Just so I have this straight, in order to drop the "jerk" suffix, a super-achieving worker who fills in for people when they are on vacation or sick, does not take vacation himself because the company is so reliant on his performance, and probably isn't getting credit for how many times he saved his coworkers must a) always be cheerful, and b) not speak up when he believes management is heading in directions that will increase reliance on said worker and make life even more difficult.
Basically the mind is cutting the heart out of a company, when both need to recognize each other's strengths and capitalize on them instead of picking a "winner".
Honestly, I've never met a brilliant jerk who actually is.
People only get genuinely brilliant because they're capable of introspection, because they're capable of looking at themselves and seeing in what areas they can improve and then they go out and do exactly that, they improve that area. If they could do that, they wouldn't be a jerk because they'd recognise it as an area of improvement.
People who are jerks often think they're better than they are and simply don't have anyone above them competent enough to call them out on their bullshit.
1. Give them a sandbox where they're the autocratic ruler and sole resident.
2. Slowly make that sandbox not at all relevant to the core of the business, by creating alternative approaches to solving the problem that the jerk used to solve. Other people will naturally route around the jerk whenever possible anyways, since nobody wants to deal with a jerk if they can help it.
3. When the sandbox becomes irrelevant and socially outcast, fire the jerk.
There are smart people who aren't jerks. Get them instead.
I am officially gone from
Find managers that can bridge the communication gap between jerks and the rest of the business. There are plenty of business people who know how to talk with someone like a specialized programmer for instance, without having any practical programming skills themselves. Every business success or failure is about finding the right people, culture, etc. Productivity is only one measure and people must be in place to motivate and communicate with all types of people.
Choosing the lesser of two evils is a choice for evil.
Maybe he wouldn't be a jerk if the rest of you weren't all so stupid! Ever think of that?
Promote him! Seems like that's what happens where I work.
Give him his own office, a supply of fast food, sodas, coffee and energy drinks and let him work on the weird stuff that would defeat the others.
Why did everything get so touchy-feely all of a sudden? Why can't a guy just work in peace without having to tip-toe around the feelings of all the precious little snowflakes?
Now, if he goes out of his way to piss people off and promote general chaos and destruction then kick his ass out, otherwise suck it up.
The word 'jerk' has gone through a transformation from when it started. First it was someone cool, then it was someone who behaves strangely (when that movie was made) and now it means someone completely rude and annoying.
When I was growing up (before the movie) in our neck of the woods, a jerk, as applied to a person, always had the third meaning (rude, annoying), unless one was referring to a "soda jerk" in old time movies. I've never heard of the other meanings, and even my Merriam Webster dictionary doesn't define the other meanings you gave, not even in a historical context. But I'm not surprised either, as all sorts of regionalisms exist that I've never heard of (especially when doing NYT crosswords).
There's a need for and room for a certain number of large-scale companies in this country and in the world. There's also a need for and room for countless smaller and medium-sized companies. They're all integral parts of a functioning society and economy. Most small/medium companies will never be big and shouldn't be. When you fully understand business scaling, you realize that both in theory and practice it's *impossible* to scale a company without changing the product or service being delivered to your consumer.
Think about the quality difference between say, Famous Restaurant Chain and that long-running Small Family-Owned Restaurant near you that makes incredible-tasting food. If you think the difference between the two is that the big tasteless one always sucked at making food but had a brilliant business guy at the reigns, and the small one, while tasty, simply lacks the business sense to scale up their operations and make real money on their talent, you've completely misunderstood how businesses scale.
Most of those famous large-chain restaurants and fast-food joints actually started out as a single family-owned restaurant that was doing very well financially because customers loved the place. They genuinely loved the food, the service and price. The low-quality form they exist in today is the direct result of scaling; there's simply no other way to do it. Quality of the goods and services *always* falls when you scale up, but you make more money. Many of those successful small family restaurants that stay that way are constantly under pressure from peers and partners to expand and are perfectly capable of handling the business process of expansion, but they relentlessly resist because they don't want to ruin a good thing.
At a small scale, each employee really matters. You do need some people who are brilliant at their respective jobs to be successful. Moving from there to the large scale is all about commoditization. It's about building a self-sustaining organization that delivers a consistent product or service regardless of which employees come and go over time. It means trading out the special people that make great things for the ability to turn out consistently mediocre things cheaply using random sets of mediocre employees. It's a hard transition to make, and it's a constant process as you grow rather than a one-time thing. If you want to grow, you have to hire people that can work with that process. People that can take themselves out of the picture personally. People who can instead design and operate an ever-expanding system where employees are just cogs in a machine which always runs smoothly even if some of the cogs are a little warped and misshapen, and even if there's a regular pace of cogs just leaving the machine and randomly-different ones replacing them sometime later.
So if you're a businessperson, or business owner, or investor, this sort of scaling and growth is what excites you. You're not excited by making the best fajitas this side of the Mississippi, you're not excited by making the best firewall software man has ever seen, etc. You're excited by creating systems out of human cogs that scale up infinitely and keep giving back ever-increasing monetary rewards. But so many business people in the world want to scale their small-to-medium company into the next behemoth and most of them will fail. Scaling is hard, and there's only so much room, and your already-larger competitors already have a big leg up on you. Most of them shouldn't even try to scale. It's perfectly ok to stick to your smaller size, not frustrate everyone with scaling attempts, and simply keep re-investing profits into making it the best damn small company anyone ever did business with.
The "brilliant jerk" isn't necessarily the problem. Maybe he's perfect for that small company, and the problem is your unnatural desire to scale things at the cost of quality, destroying a beautiful and functional small cog in the economy by trying to make it too big.
11*43+456^2
I read TFA, assuming that the definition of "Brilliant Jerk" in the summary was, in fact, summarized, and that the whole definition actually defined the "jerkiness" as something other than just not being a "business person". But that wasn't the case. Later in the article were some half-assed examples of what the author means by "jerky" behavior, but still no real definition. He ended up a competitor, so? He poached employees? He started legal battles? Competitors do do that, as we've seen with Apple, Samsung, Google, and countless smaller companies.
How many "business people" do you need? Someone's got to treat patients or develop products or otherwise provide some goods and services for the salesmen to sell and the marketeers to market. And if everyone says "yes, let's do it" to everything, you'll do everything without even thinking about it.
If an employee just doesn't fit in anymore and everyone's unhappy about it, then sure, end the relationship as quickly and amicably as possible. But why label someone a "jerk" just because the business changed? If you now need a hammer but keep trying to drive nails with the saw, that's your fault. Blaming the saw for being a saw makes you the poor workman who blames his tools.
I am not a crackpot.
TFA read like a breakup with one side telling their story while the other side was not allowed to speak.
What is most telling to me is the authors willingness to judge and place blaim on others while demonstrating his own lack of leadership.
Except for the jerk part, your assertion is accurate. Woz was and is brilliant.... Jobs OTOH was a narcissistic panty-boy with sociopathic tendencies (lying, conning, getting others to do his work then claiming it) who's "contribution" lives on in its pure, distilled form in Apple's lawsuit against Samsung.
Fuck Apple.
Agreed. Jerk has always been a way to call someone an asshole without swearing.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
How about if you stop calling the people who built the company "jerks" and plotting how to get rid of them behind their backs?
Just a thought. It might lead to fewer people realizing that they don't like working with you, leaving the company, becoming competitors, poaching employees and starting legal battles over stupid things that could easily have been sorted out between people who aren't jerks.
But what would I know? I'm probably a jerk too.
I think that the situation as described is incomplete or missing part of the picture.
What he is describing is what happens when you have a highly valuable and contributing team member who has a vision for the company that differs from what everyone else wants.
Assume we have 10 employees.
Lets say Employee X has a value of 1000, and the rest have a value of 100 each. The company has a value of 1900. Clearly Employee X is valuable and to get where you need to be, you need to accommodate his views. He is basically more than half the company
Now you grow to 40 employees. Employee X is still worth 1000, but the rest of the group is worth 3900. Employee X should not be dictating where the entire group wants to go, even if he carries so much influence.
Employee X did not become less valuable, he did become less important. The only time Employee X becomes a Jerk is if Employee X allows his ego to think he is still more than half the value of the company.
The solution is that Employee X needs to be treated as a consultant or contract. Let him be the rock star that saves every ones ass. But as good as he is, he cannot lead if no one wants to follow him, and he should not lead if the place he wants to lead is not the place the team wants to go. And Employee X should not be allowed to prevent someone else from leading if his plans do not add as much to the group as the other guy.
A good leader is not the guy who is worth 1000 to everyone else's 100. A good leader is the guy who can get a value of 120 from people with a base value of 100.
END COMMUNICATION
I was in a situation where we had a very bright and capable college intern, and we hired him when he graduated. The kid was the kind of person you could throw an amorphous ill-stated problem at and he'd work out a solution. He also had mad Linux and OSS skills which was sadly lacking at the company I was working for.
However, he was a bit odd, like Sheldon on Big Bang Theory (but a bit nicer). He was nervous with strangers. He had a certain way of living his life, and did not like change.
So (after he was moved out of my group) the company came along and put him on the road by himself to visit customer sites across the country and meet new people in unfamiliar cities. He melted down and was let go after a few months of that.
Some people were not meant to work with customers. Some people were not meant to work on amorphous technical problems. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. A good manager will recognize that, and maximize the performance of their reports (along the lines of the theorem of comparative advantage).
I'm not saying you should never challenge your reports or encourage them to push their limits, but you should recognize that pushing them too far may break them.
I have seen these fights before and it usually comes down to shares. Often the Brilliant Jerk has a founder's fraction of the shares 1/2, 1/3, 1/4 and the new MBA types that have been hired (usually mostly in a sales capacity) are envious that when the big sale comes along that those few founders are going to get all the cheese. So they convince them to dilute but the so called jerk will say good for you, dilute your shares, mine stay as they are. He knows that the new MBA types are very replaceable now that they can just offer them a salary.
The other variation of the brilliant jerk is that they have again a founder's share and the other founders are business types. The brilliant jerk did the programming of 10 to earn his share but now they have hired 20 programmers and the business people suddenly decide that the original programmer isn't carrying his weight anymore while they do all the big deals. So as the really big sellout comes they resent that while they "made it rain" that the brilliant jerk will get just as much as them. They rationalize that even if he is worth 10 programmers that they can now just hire 10 programmers for far less.
Rarely, if ever, have I seen where the original founders were causing a problem for anyone except for getting in the way of self-entitled jerks.
I don't know the origin of the word 'jerk' but I wonder if it had to do anything with the kind of people who normally did the "jerking water" job. I could see that being shortened down to 'jerks'.
The author of the article will only consider you not to be a jerk if you know your place. Which, by the way, is way down at the bottom of the org chart. You have to remember that, no matter how reliant on your skills the company is, and how interchangeable the MBA-types are, you are always less important than anyone with an MBA.
The Jerk must be fed ... with pizza and Coca-Cola.
It must be kept cool and in the shade during summer days and kept warm and cosy during the harsh storms of the winter.
Always keep the Jerk dry and away from women.
Do not talk with the Jerk unless about jerky things.
The Jerk needs better and faster machines than the others, whom we do not want to mention here.
That is the way to keep the Jerk ... to increase your wealth and wisdom.
The point of the article was a person who was the lynchpin in starting a business out of nothing and turning it into a rising star is often not well suited for steering a growing corporation, that is, managing a team that's grown large enough that not every decision is made by consensus of all the participants. When the business moves to this state, arrogance and stubbornness--the very qualities that made the "brilliant jerk" indispensible during the incubation of the company--make them jerks to the company trying to go mainstream.
True enough.
The correct way to deal with this is to divert them away from the corporate leadership structure and into a new start-up venture, where being brilliant and pig-headed once again becomes an asset. A good "brilliant jerk" can probably spark four or five new companies before the rough edges get worn off. Look at Steve Jobs, for example.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The word 'jerk' has gone through a transformation from when it started. First it was someone cool
No, "jerk" was never a synonym for "cool". It was originally coined to label the kid that had a job pouring soda at the drug store; "Soda jerk". In short, the uncool guy, the guy that had to take all the cool kids' shit or be fired. It transformed from there to mean "dweeb" or "dork" (the Steve Martin jerk) and finally morphed as a euphamism for "asshole".
Free Martian Whores!
Years ago I worked at a place called Divine Interventures in their "Buzz" group. We had a guy - he was the webmaster/developer guy, one of the first employees, etc.
Guy had ideas for graph design that were better than what the designers came up with, came up with awesome ideas pretty much whenever we had a problem, but was kind of brusque.
He got laid off in the first wave (and was smart to do it - one of the only people to get a full severance package when the companyimploded, and literally started his new job the next day) and about a month after that we got written up in a magazine as being a great place to work in Chicago. There were several specific things pointed out in the article as why it was so great, and when the CEO was holding an all hands meeting to congratulate us, she asked who came up with idea one, and it was pointed out this guy did. Then idea two and... Same guy. Then idea three and... Same guy. "Well, decisions like laying him off are probably why we're going out of business," the only honest thing I've ever heard from a CEO.
If they are really brilliant, it's worth keeping them around.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.