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The Last Word: It's All About the Narcissist
March 06, 2008
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the most exhausting manager of them all? The Narcissist. In this month's excerpt from Crazy Bosses, Stanley Bing sheds some light on the self-absorbed supervisor with a distorted sense of reality and a tremendous knack for creating turnover. Famous narcissists include: Louis XIV, Ted Turner and Donald Trump
By Stanley Bing
All the great criminals of the last forty years have been in command of great wells of narcissism. Most recently, the men of Enron lit up the sky. Before that, the line between big businessmen and criminals has always been very thin and fuzzy. Guys like Captain Kidd and Francis Drake were either privateers or national heroes, depending on who was paying them. Jay Gould; Andrew Carnegie; Henry Ford; Joseph Kennedy, the father of the clan; Michael Milken; T. Boone Pickens; Richard Nixon; Oliver North; Rumsfeld and Cheney, formulating lies to sell the United Nations; Rush Limbaugh, making fun of a victim of terminal Parkinson's disease; also murderers like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao. The guys you and I deal with are much smaller potatoes. But their tiny engines run on the same fuel that powers the big diesel trucks that dominate the road.
The narcissist is a dreamer, a planner, but not necessarily a worker. A lawyer I know pulled an all-nighter on an injunction, while her narcissist boss went home to his supper, as always. She relates: "The boss came in the next morning, and said to me, 'What are you doing here?' He said, 'Didn't you hear me? We settled. I got the call just before I went home. Didn't anybody tell you?' " At that moment, blind with exhaustion and rage, the poor droid just snapped. "I took a little bottle of Wite-Out and threw it hard, and it smashed all over his door," she says, smiling. "He didn't clean the door. He had it removed and threw it away." My correspondent further notes that from that point on in, communications between the boss and the staff improved.
Me, I feel sorry for narcissists, perhaps because I am one myself. It's not easy being a narcissist. The world is very disappointing. People are always harshing your mellow. In fact, your mellow is very, very thin. When it holds, life is good. When it doesn't, you feel like killing somebody. You're constantly whipsawing back and forth between priapic excitement and suicidal, homicidal dejection. Consequently, we are either extremely jolly or extremely unpleasant.
CRAZY BOSSES by Stanley Bing. Copyright © 2007 by Stanley Bing. Reprinted by arrangement with HarperCollins Publishers. Readers interested in bulk purchases of Crazy Bosses may contact the HarperCollins special markets department at (212) 207-7528, or by e-mail at spsales@harpercollins.com.
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