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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?"
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)
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
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".
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
Maybe he wouldn't be a jerk if the rest of you weren't all so stupid! Ever think of that?
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
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.
Right. Based on reading the article, the author's definition of a "jerk" is someone who doesn't understand that they were just a resource to be used during the founding of the company and then thrown away. Pretty much the worst thing the author lists as something the "brilliant jerk" does is bothering management by assuming they will deign to talk to him. The author is assuming that we all share his implicit understanding that the people who built the company will stay down at the bottom while the company grows and the managers will grow with the company adding more and more layers between them.
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.
If we remove the adjective "Brilliant", it seems that the original post is saying that people who produce things are jerks and business people aren't. That would be the opposite of my experience.
It also sounds like he's saying, "We have a guy who did all the work to get us off the ground. He's not as necessary anymore, so the PHBs want to sideline him and reap the benefits of his hard work."
Perhaps you should think about giving HIM a golden parachute like you would one of your "Brilliant Business People" buddies.
I recall seeing that happen once at a previous job. Four of us, and one gent who acted as leader/purchaser/fill-in-admin/etc, basically built an entire IT infrastructure from the ground up. Then the PTB hired this reject VP from a huge F500 corp as the new IT Director. Everything immediately goes to shit as he starts slinging around acronyms and demands that were workable for huge orgs like the one he just left, but were impossible for a tiny IT department to implement properly in the deadlines he wanted. To top that off, he whips out the microscope, looking for something - anything - to hold over each of our heads as a threat and as a consolidation of power. It just got uglier from there. It took a development admin suffering a stroke, and a sysadmin getting a heart attack before this jackass would get a clue and hire some help to fulfill his ever-increasing list of demands. Given the economy at the time, other jobs were impossible to find, so we were stuck for awhile.
There's only one person out of the original crew left, and she's likely to be gone once her degree is complete. The rest of us said 'fuck it' and pulled the D-Ring on his ass at the first graceful opportunity (and some even sooner). Last I heard their expenses went way up since most of us left (having to hire consultants all the time to fix even minor breaks is a bitch, I guess).
Eventually shit hits the fan for such people. OTOH, even if it doesn't, no skin offa mine - the job I left them for came with a huge raise, a mere 30% of the workload, and telecommuting. First 3 months felt like an effing vacation to me.
But yeah, the corp was shifting from start-up (of sorts) to full-blown. Thing is, unless someone takes control of the situation, it'll eventually crash - either figuratively (budget) or literally (as systems crap out).
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?