Do jerks make better leaders?

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"The merely rich are not rich enough to rule the modern market. The things that change modern history, the big national and international loans, the big educational and philanthropic foundations, the purchase of numberless newspapers, the big prices paid for peerages, the big expenses often incurred in elections - these are getting too big for everybody except the misers; the men with the largest of earthly fortunes and the smallest of earthly aims. There are two other odd and rather important things to be said about them. The first is this: that with this aristocracy we do not have the chance of a lucky variety in types which belongs to larger and looser aristocracies. The moderately rich include all kinds of people even good people. Even priests are sometimes saints; and even soldiers are sometimes heroes. Some doctors have really grown wealthy by curing their patients and not by flattering them; some brewers have been known to sell beer. But among the Very Rich you will never find a really generous man, even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egoistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it." G. K. Chesterton  http://alanarchibald.homestead.com/ChestertonQuotes.html

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Does a leader have to be a jerk? If you just start ticking off names, it sure seems to help. Steve Jobs, Michael Eisner, Larry Ellison, Martha Stewart, Meg Whitman, Sam Zell, Carly Fiorina, Bob Nardelli, “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap, Richard Fuld, Mark Hurd, Jeffrey Skilling. And in a class of his own is Donald Trump, who has parlayed an unbounded self-regard not just into a real estate and media empire but into a brief early lead in the Republican primary polls.By Geoffrey Nunberg, Published: September 7

You can see why people would make the connection. There are times when a swollen ego and indifference to the feelings of others seem just the ticket for career advancement.

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Or you could put a positive spin on it, as the Michigan Business School’s Noel M. Tichy does. “To an extent,” he says, “every good leader is an asshole,” explaining that they’re despised because their underlings can’t appreciate their vision or willingness to take risks. One way or the other, modern executive pay structures are apt to exacerbate the condition. It’s an immutable law of economics that one’s sense of entitlement increases as the ratio of one’s compensation to that of the average worker.

The association of leadership and the A-word may not actually hold up that well, but it’s interesting for its very persistence.

It dates back to the word’s earliest use as a term of abuse. The epithet was a recent coining of World War II GIs when Gen. George S. Patton became the first military leader tagged with it, by both his men and his superiors. By all accounts, the soubriquet was well deserved. Patton was a brilliant tactician, but he could also be a prima donna, a martinet, a suck-up and on occasion an abusive jerk. Asked why he despised Patton, Gen. Omar Bradley cited an episode in which Patton urinated in the slit trench of one of his division commanders in front of his men to convey that it was cowardly to take cover in an air raid.

That incident didn’t make it into the 1970 film “Patton,” which depicted the general as a colorful maverick, making him a cultural icon and a model of successful management. To date, he has inspired more books on leadership than George C. Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower or any other military commander other than George Washington, who had a 150-year head start.

As those books tell the story, Patton’s abusiveness was part of a calculated effort to motivate his men to achieve an excellence they didn’t know they were capable of. As the author of a book calledPatton on Leadership puts it, “If he slapped a soldier, well, it was certainly wrong, but he thought it necessary for the morale of his troops….[T]he discipline and the obedience required by a great leader are so often cause for griping and displeasure. But in retrospect, to have served under Patton was a red badge of courage to be worn forever.”

That may be overstated. The military historian Edwin Palmer Hoyt has said of Patton that “he did not impress the troops as much as he impressed other generals with the notion that he impressed the troops.” But it succeeds in reassuring managers that one can be harsh or insulting to subordinates in the conviction that it's for their own good and that they'll be thankful for it later. This theme recurs in a whole shelf of titles that offer leadership tips from figures whose names are frequently paired with the A-word, such as Dugout Days: Untold Tales and Leadership Lessons from the Extraordinary Career of Billy Martin or The Rumsfeld Way: Leadership Wisdom of a Battle-Hardened Maverick .