I haven't been able to get this idea out of my mind that to be a successful CEO, you need to be a sociopath. Somehow it feels like decent people with decent products just don't make it.
I think this is what Nietzche calls the master and slave morality. Basically, generations of slaves, or peasants, or whatever, develop a morality that is fit for purpose for the life of a slave. Slaves care about things like loyalty, keeping your word, not being a squeaky wheel, honesty, and all that because those traits are adaptive for living and working together with a with a bunch of peers.
Conversely, the master morality is adapted to being a master. A King may lie in diplomacy and betray allies and that kind of thing would be horrible in a peasant, but the King's actions might make his entire country better off and in a utilitarian sense that values only the King's countrymen - it may make everyone better off. But regardless of who is made better off by it the masters, like the peasants, have developed their own sense of morality, closer to ends justifying the means, because it is adaptive for them.
Names like "Master" and "Slave" make it seem like the master morality is the good morality or that the slave morality is bad. But I think those are just value judgments that come from the words. Nietzche says (to my understanding) that the truly noble person must move beyond either the master or slave morality and do what is actually right based on his own understanding and without regarding for the folk traditions of either class of master or slave morality.
Ultimately, what I'm trying to get at is it may be the case that your morality is adapted to being a worker-bee and the CEO's morality is adapted to being a CEO and so what the CEO does can seem sociopathic because the CEO is actually playing by a different set of rules or with different goals in mind.
CEO pay going from an average of 21-1 of the average worker in the 1960s to over 335-1 by the 2010s is certainly “playing by a different set of rules”.
Ethical systems all have 'don't make waves' built into them. Everyone who horns into a crowded market or even a greenfield is in some psychological sense a rule breaker. Competition and strategy are psychologically hard if you view your competitor as the in-group
And yet, often times your competitor is in the in-group when thinking about what your 'industry is' and how your actions and your competitors' actions raise or lower the profile of the industry.
When I play sports, I compete to win. I also don't try to break their ankles.
In business, I can see that if a business attacks your business in a breaking way, maybe you need to retaliate in same. But as a default? I challenge the concept that everyone who horns into a market is a rule breaker. They are a norm breaker, and that could be conflated with rules, but I don't think that's quite the same.
I am literally writing a pitch deck right now (just for fun). My solution statement includes stuff like "respecting the user - no tracking, no selling data, no dark patterns"... deep down I doubt any investor would even look at this and would laugh at the naivety.
They would look at FB, Reddit and others and, naturally, want a piece of that pie.
Unfortunately, I think the better way to get funding would be to say:
* this is how we can capture as much data from the user as possible while convincing the user it is good for them
* this is how we can sell it to the highest bidder
If Duckduckgo were trying to raise (assuming they had good growth metrics) and they said: look because people enter search terms we can generate targeted ads with no tracking, no dark patterns, etc. People value privacy a lot more these days (see FB tanking in value) and we will capture that market. I think a lot of investors would bite.
If your hypothesis is "look people would rather pay than be sold" and your product is a /paid/ social networking site with 50% growth MoM for a few months and great retention. Then great, let's hear all about it.
If you're just starting some generic product with no revenue and "no tracking no selling data no dark patterns" is some unrelated value prop that 0.1% of users (all of whom browse HN) care about. Then it's just a signal that your voice inside your own head is probably so loud that it'll drown out whatever the market is trying to tell you.
It is not inherently amoral to track a user or sell that user's data, so restricting yourself (a cost) has to have a benefit (a value) otherwise you're inventing rules for yourself that makes your journey needlessly harder.
Are your target consumers almost exclusively people who value privacy and likely already have ad blockers installed? If not, you should probably take it out of the pitch deck if you want to make money.
Don’t! Keep your pitch deck as is, I say find the right investors who take your side than you caving in to the status quo, tech is different than Wall Street you _can_ make a positive sum contribution (where everyone wins) while monetizing (it’s usually a bit longer game but worth it)
Only a Sith deals in absolutes, but I do think the odds of success are tilted in favour of greedy manipulative liars and against kind, honest, decent folk. We used to have religion to convince people that it was OK because the rich were getting the short end of the stick in eternity, but now it's just sad.
The best people I know are nurses getting paid pennies to keep people alive. The world sucks. Sorry.
To be or to become. Very soon I will dismiss somebody for first time in my life, I feel very sorry on personal level, but every day I am detaching my emotions more and more from that decision. Its business, it is what it is.
I think to be a successful CEO or founder you have to be able to distinguish business and personal relationships and actions. This is exceptionally hard to do, especially if you are a subordinate.
Because they are more likely to have psychopathic traits than the general population, but much less so than criminals. But not really enough to worry about. The vast majority of psychopaths are in prison and regular jobs. And the vast majority of CEOs display no psychopathic tendencies.
"Roughly 4% to as high as 12% of CEOs exhibit psychopathic traits, according to some expert estimates, many times more than the 1% rate found in the general population and more in line with the 15% rate found in prisons. "
The key aspect of CEOs that make for success is aligning people with vision and some measure of bravery to eschew "traditional" and "safe" to pursue that vision. That can be either because you are a master manipulator and driven by ego-mania, or because you are genuine and compelling and understand your industry, or both.
Physiologically, you should try to be tall, good looking, outgoing, confident, somewhat narcissistic, and infected with Toxoplasmosis.
I don’t agree. We need more people to support positive sum game rules than zero sum game rules.
Keep your values high and find the right people (investors) who side with you.
Definitely not! If you act like a jerk it's not like that goes unnoticed either. Wouldn't you rather do business with companies that seem like they're generally trying to be helpful? Stripe is a good example. YC is a good example.
Frankly there is a shortage of companies like this, thats part of why you may feel this way.
This shortage makes it more valuable to operate with integrity.
Also it's just a much more fun way to live. What else are you going to do? Go around screwing people over all the time? At the end of the day you still have to live with yourself.
If you're looking for examples of this mindset I recommend reading Feynmann[0][1], How I Became The Honest Broker[2], and Various Diatribes from old hacker culture[3].
It's possible to play extremely hard and not be an asshole. It's called good sportsmanship. It's not required but it's entirely possible.
I used to work in executive training and have worked with many CEOs of large orgs - to get to the top, for the most part, you have to be incredibly empathetic.
You also have to be incredibly outcome-oriented. You need to prioritize a range of objectives against a mountain of constraints. Sometimes that means deprioritizing parts of a product or company mission to further the longterm success of the business, using the information you have. If they didn’t, then they wouldn’t be doing their job. Sometimes that also means deprioritizing people. This is why every leader will always be able to be portrayed as a sociopath.
The actual sociopaths are one or two levels beneath - those that are jockeying for good standing by pushing themselves up and others down. They rarely make it to the top and if they do, aren’t there for long.
In my experience, those who do not see this tend to hold different levels of either empathy or outcome-orientation.
Here's a VC, whose main driving force is the rate of company growth, telling people that they benefit from being nicer.
I believe Sturgeon's Law applies to companies as well. The average programmer is pretty incompetent and paid terribly, but often not within our social groups. Most CEOs you have access to would probably not be hired by a good company; the good ones are likely outside our social circle.
The idea that only sociopaths succeed is an artefact of what we observe. And what we observe is driven by which narratives get turned into stories about business success, into hagiographies about politicians and businesspeople, and into folklore.
Everyone wants to talk about what a horrible person Steve Jobs was, nobody wants to talk about any of the tens of thousands of multi-millionaires who are running decent businesses, and who may not be saintly figures, but they aren't asking new hires to sign away their right to a bathroom break, either.
There's a really fantastic book I recommend everyone read about success, it was popular a couple of decades ago:
It was recommended to me by a man who was a centi-millionaire at the time. He owned one car, a Volvo Estate, and his partner would drive him to the commuter train to his office in a building he owned and where he could easily have as many parking spaces as he wanted.
He was driven and very successful. I asked him if the money changed anything. He told me:
"Yes. We used to drive to [Grateful] Dead concerts and camp. Now we can afford to fly, and even take our friends."
The message of the book is that the reality of moderately wealthy people and business owners is very, very different from what sells copies of business magazines.
I believe that very strongly to this exact day. Also, I work for a CEO is is not a complete sociopath, so I'm up to n=2 for my experience.
He once stopped by my small apartment to pick up a document I wrote for a pitch or financing or something. He looked around at my furnishings, and said:
"This reminds me of the apartment we had in Montréal when we were still in university. We had some good times there."
Game theory does not say this is the case in every game, only in certain games like Prisoner's Dilemma.
The fact about reality is that there are lots of games, and if you choose a game which is zero-sum or even negative-sum, it's easy to say "This is just how the universe works." But nevertheless, that may only be true locally. If you go somewhere else, you may find that there is a game which is positive-sum.
It may not be a big game, it may not be the most popular or prevalent game, but what do you care? Each of us only needs to find one thing that works for us.
If you like zero-sum games, great, play them. But it's a choice, it's not forced upon us by the universe.
For example, in many businesses there's an "ecosystem." Within the ecosystem, companies are actually "frenemies," because while they're ostensibly competing, the more value is available in the ecosystem, the more it grows, creating more opportunities for everyone in the ecosystem..
I lived through the evolution of the personal computer ecosystem literally from the Altair to now, I've watched it in action. Ecosystems have both zero-sum and positive-sum characteristics. Mac versus Windows was a death-match, but being an ISV within the Mac ecosystem was very much a positive-sum game.
When I was selling my Mac classified ad software, I could have thought of every other vendor as a competitor for my customers' fixed budgets. But if I saw a problem and recommended some other software that solved it, they got more value out of their automation and would end up spending more money on me. Where as if they didn't get enough value out of their Macs, they would switch to WIndows and I'd have had to port my app to continue to serve them.
The same thing is true of working in a company. Yes, you're kind of competing with your colleagues, but at the same time, cooperating with your colleagues makes everyone money. So working as an employee has both zero-sum and positive-sum characteristics.
Maybe I misunderstand your claim, but as I interpret what you've written, I feel it doesn't match my observation. I really do think there are lots and lots and lots of things that are positive sum games in business.
Come to think of it, this web site is one of them too.
You might be buying into a sociopathic definition of "success". If your definition of success is to be #1 in the market, focused on profits over everything else, and have no non-work criteria for success, then yes, being a sociopath helps.
But if you define success by happiness, life satisfaction, family and friends, enjoying your work, and fulfilling your personal goals. That can be done more readily without going sociopathic.
> "Why do I feel like you need to be a sociopath to succeed?"
ok, you hooked me... lets see what you're talking about
> "to be a successful CEO"
Oh, well thats really only one very niche version of success. I personally can only think of a handful of CEOs that I consider "successful." They're really just managers, and we happen to be at a point in American history where they are very well compensated... historically this has not really been the case. Conservative (small c) argument: Name 5 successful CEOs from the 1930s. Now name 5 Successful Authors, Actors, Politicians, etc.
> "to be a successful CEO, you need to be a sociopath"
I would probably rephrase this as to be a successful CEO you need to be an "opportunist". Sociopathy is a mental illness that seems related to what you seem to be implying, but "sociopathy" exclusively is a bit narrow of a definition. If we were to say "all corporate managers are sociopaths" that would be very very prevalent.
> "Somehow it feels like decent people with decent products just don't make it."
I feel like you need more evidence to support this claim, and a more specific thesis. As an example per "The millionaire Next Door" most high net-worth individuals are just hardworking business owners that invest in income producing assets, and don't spend a lot. CEOs rarely make products unless they are a founder that becomes the CEO. CEOs as a group are corporate managers, and they usually become corporate managers by being trained to be corporate managers.
I personally don't agree with this take either. Too much anecdotal evidence on my side. CEOs, like the rest of the population have shortcomings, quirks, mental illnesses, etc. Thats just humanity.
Because that's the correct intuition. The contemporary world is not designed for sane people. All the systems around us are designed to alienate people from each other with artificial intermediators like money, status, fame, and just generally useless toys and gadgets. To succeed in such a world you have to have sociopathic tendencies. You have to value material goods and possessions over people which is kinda insane when you really think about it.
> The contemporary world is not designed for sane people.
Sanity is defined by people who want to control the masses. The world is very much designed to contain sane people. Or people who can work in the world are declared sane. Something like those.
Correct and if you deviate from the standards then you will be medicated until you are subdued and willing to work for the machines destroying the habitability of the planet.
Hot take but sociopathy is technically the compulsively violent one. People think it’s “social psychopath” but sociopath implies physical violence. Psychopaths are what you’re thinking of. Not always violent, but always charming.
Sure, their job is non-grinding and non-STEM so they have tons of leeway in "corporate relations". They can afford to ride the wide margins of behavior their position provides, and game the system.
Meanwhile sociopath engineer means you hate giving yourself to a group of people, and knowing your place.
That's fine because in the end, a week without a CEO may be damaging. A week without production is catastrophic. So when the rubber hits the road, it's the happy down-to-earth worker bees that produce the value the managers play around with.
Get out of your comfort zone. Seek out awkwardness, and anxiety, and revel in the uncomfortable. That's how you learn to not give a fuck. Do things that would bring you shame, grin and bare it. After awhile none of it applies anymore.
Yeah. For better or worse that'll put you in a more Machiavellian mindset. It's an excellent book, but I definitely recall feeling like it stunted my emotional growth and perception of the world for a few years after I first read it.
You don't need to be a "sociopath" to cultivate advantageous behaviors. Just reorient your frame on what counts as "good". Most people are naturally limited because they assume good = "noone is offended, people obeyed manners, surface level politeness." Reframe your understanding of the world so good = "maximize efficiency and removed limits to human potential"
Your earning potential is fine. You really, really don't want to be a sociopath, because sociopaths suck at taking advantage of win-win opportunities. As a rule, they more or less hate the world around them and feel that the only way to win is to screw everyone else. Just focus on playing the game well and you'll beat them easily. Most average people don't care much about doing either, the one real advantage sociopaths have is their focus.
because it really helps, particularly for spectacular success, which is held up perpetually in front of our faces by the media, which also appears to be filled with sociopaths
in the bible, the devil had the power to offer Christ all power and riches of this world, which Christ refused
decent people with decent products just don't make it.
Which is why you need to make your product a little more than decent. "Evil
will always triumph because good is dumb." So be less dumb, and you can
stay just as good.
Conversely, the master morality is adapted to being a master. A King may lie in diplomacy and betray allies and that kind of thing would be horrible in a peasant, but the King's actions might make his entire country better off and in a utilitarian sense that values only the King's countrymen - it may make everyone better off. But regardless of who is made better off by it the masters, like the peasants, have developed their own sense of morality, closer to ends justifying the means, because it is adaptive for them.
Names like "Master" and "Slave" make it seem like the master morality is the good morality or that the slave morality is bad. But I think those are just value judgments that come from the words. Nietzche says (to my understanding) that the truly noble person must move beyond either the master or slave morality and do what is actually right based on his own understanding and without regarding for the folk traditions of either class of master or slave morality.
Ultimately, what I'm trying to get at is it may be the case that your morality is adapted to being a worker-bee and the CEO's morality is adapted to being a CEO and so what the CEO does can seem sociopathic because the CEO is actually playing by a different set of rules or with different goals in mind.