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We went to see the Rolling Stones open their A Bigger Bang tour in Boston. It put to rest an event that’s haunted me for 16 years: Walking through the halls of my then-place of employment, a friend gleefully brandished his two tickets to the Stones’ Steel Wheels concert. I nearly burst into tears — I’d just bought four tickets to Sesame Street Live.

A Bigger Bang was, if you’re wondering, phenomenal but that’s not why I’m bringing up the subject. You’ll have to wait for that while I tell you about Larry Brody’s new book, Turning Points in Television. (I hope you appreciate me. What other IT column bases its content on the Rolling Stones and the history of television instead of XML and web services?)

Larry, a creative force in the television industry for several decades, wrote Turning Points in Television to be less a walk through memory lane than an insightful analysis of the history of an industry. (One of the more minor insights, given an overly kind mention, came from a column yours truly published some years back — that in most media businesses, you and I are neither customer nor consumer. We’re the product, sold to advertisers. The material we consume is not the product — it’s bait.)

The history of television is, sadly, the history of every industry. Founded in a burst of creative energy and fostered by periodic injections of brilliant innovation, it was run by the creative innovators. But only for awhile.

In the case of television, the writing was on the wall in 1978 when Larry met with Deanna Barkley, vice president of “long form development” at NBC. “What’ve you got that’s generic enough for NBC?” she asked. Now we have Survivor Guatemala. Having lived in Guatemala for six months, I feel comfortable asking this question: What’s the point? Just give the money to the millions of Mayans whose ancestors survived the Spaniards. What’s next — Survivor Mall of America?

An unsettling aspect of the industry’s evolution is the nature of the early innovators. They were characters, and that describes those toward the middle of the pack. Many of the most important were bullies, screamers, and head cases. Larry describes, for example, David Gerber — one of his mentors. Faced with a network market researcher who tried to change their hit series Police Story, “the Gerb” screamed, ranted, raved, swore, knocked his chair down and stormed out. Then he screamed, ranted, raved, swore at and threatened his writers (the threat: working at NBC). “In the TV business,” Larry explains, “that’s called being a mentor.”

Meanwhile, the business punditocracy is very fond of concepts like “Emotional Intelligence,” measured by EQ — an even more pseudoscientific measure than the IQ its proponents want to supplant. EQ is supposed to be a Good Thing to have. In most industries, EQ is, in fact, a valued trait. I wonder, though, whether that’s healthy. The Gerb’s EQ was un-measurably low. His value was immeasurable.

We’ve come to treasure a near-robotic persona in our business managers and leaders, and we’re in danger of extending this preference to those who do real work. The synonym for professionalism is, too often, blandness.

Which brings us back to the Stones. It occurred to me while pondering the value of EQ, individual skills, group process and so on (don’t worry — it was after the concert, not during) that not one member of the band is the best at what he does. Eric Clapton and Mark Knopfler are better guitarists than Keith Richards and Ron Wood (and just about the entire rest of the guitar-playing world, too). Charlie Watts is a competent drummer, no more. Jagger’s singing voice is, by any objective standard, awful.

But together they’re a killer touring band and have been for more than forty years. A management theorist would probably use them as an object lesson in the value of teamwork over individual skills. Who knows — maybe Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ron Wood all have high emotional intelligence.

This management theorist thinks the point is different — that the Stones aren’t bland. They aren’t the most talented performers, but they’re among the most flamboyant, and you have to give a 62-year-old guy credit for running around on stage for two and a half hours without a break like, as someone once said, a rooster on acid.

I figure these guys have something more useful than being good at getting along — they get along with each other.

Or maybe it’s only rock and roll. But I like it.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

Ever wonder how they sleep at night?

Business executives sometimes have to let people go. Sometimes they have to lay off large numbers. There are occasions when companies have to push employees hard — to work long hours and extra days without any more pay.

It happens. The future being somewhat less predictable than the past, strategies don’t always turn out to be wise and tactics sometimes backfire. New leaders sometimes come in to find a predecessor has allowed a culture of mediocrity to develop, and with it the accumulation of too many employees, and too many of them with less-than-superb talent.

Business leaders sometimes do have to make hard choices. When the situations arise, the good ones do. That isn’t the question.

The question is whether they sleep well afterward; whether they accept large bonuses and option awards for doing so; whether they take joy in the exercise, as many employees suspect.

It turns out that many of them might.

KJR Club member Paul Novelli pointed me to an article by Alan Deutschman in the July 2005 issue of Fast Company recently, describing the research and conclusions of criminal psychologist Robert Hare.

Dr. Hare is widely known in his field for developing the “Psychopathy Checklist” — a twenty-item personality evaluation that’s the gold standard among law enforcement professionals for the diagnosis of criminal psychopaths. Dr. Hare has reached a disturbing conclusion: Many CEOs are borderline or more-than-borderline psychopaths. He suggests that boards of directors should screen CEO candidates for psychopathy — the absence of empathy, compassion, remorse and guilt.

I hope it never happens. In the modern world of business, if boards of directors were to apply the Psychopathy Checklist to CEO candidates, many would use it to identify those best suited for the job. They’d use it, that is, to systematically exclude candidates exhibiting capabilities for empathy, compassion, remorse and guilt. While conventionally regarded as useful personality traits, they can interfere with the successful operation of a modern publicly held business.

Enterprises compete globally. Among their competitors are companies whose strategies and tactics aren’t constrained by empathy, compassion, remorse and guilt, and which acknowledge responsibility only to shareholders — not to employees, customers, or the communities and nations within which they operate. Even their obligation to the law is limited to a comparison between the cost of compliance and the cost of the fines for noncompliance. (Don’t agree? Research Union Carbide’s track record in Bhopal.)

There have always been amoral corporations. What’s new is that behavior we’d consider psychopathic in a human being is business as usual in business. So when a company competes with psychopathic rivals and doesn’t adopt a similar stance it’s like trying to adhere to the Marquis of Queensbury rules in a knife fight.

Here’s a challenge for you, as chief information officer or as a manager who would like to become a chief information officer: According to Dr. Hare, chances are good that at some point in your career you’ll find yourself working for a borderline or more than borderline psychopath. Can you handle that kind of situation?

The easier (but still hard) version of the question is associated with those business leaders who harm shareholders — the Bernie Ebbers and Chainsaw Als of the executive suite. Harming shareholders is universally recognized to be Bad, so at least the situation is clear.

There are also many business leaders, at all levels, who exhibit more psychopathy than you might personally find comfortable but who don’t express it in ways that break laws or harm shareholders. If you report to them, you might find yourself dealing with abusive behavior, unreasonable demands on your staff, shoddy practices toward customers, assignments or explanations given to you that deliberately conflict with those given to other managers, or any of a number of other circumstances that break no laws.

The question used to be what you should do if you find yourself working for a bad boss. Dr. Hare has just raised the stakes, by letting us know some of these bad bosses are, clinically speaking, psychopaths. Bad boss or psychopathic boss, if you’re looking for the answer here, you won’t find it, because there is no “the answer” — leave, perhaps, assuming you have alternatives. In a large city you probably do. In a smaller community you might not. Not that leaving fixes anything beyond your personal circumstances. And where will you go, when managers are, in increasing proportions, required to behave psychopathically?

Businesses are, increasingly, psychopathic entities. According to Dr. Hare, many have psychopathic leaders.

One wonders which came first.

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