Was Steve Jobs a Good Decision Maker?

Jobs holding a white iPhone 4 at Worldwide Developers Conference 2010

 

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Tom Davenport for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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The world continues to honor and mourn Steve Jobs weeks after his death, and there is plenty to praise. His legacy lives on in today’s iCloud and iOS 5 availability, and in the new iPhone 4S being praised by several prominent technology reviewers. David Pogue, my favorite technology writer, is so enthusiastic as to call the new phone’s features almost magical.

I’ve long admired Apple products, too. By my count there are six Macbooks, two iPads, and three iPhones—not to mention a few iPods—in my family’s possession. If you judge only by the product outcomes or by Apple’s market value, Jobs seems the best decision-maker in the history of consumer products.

But of course, like every other human, his decisions weren’t all great. In the 1980s he hired John Sculley to succeed himself as CEO of Apple, and Sculley presided over a period of slow growth and product missteps in the ensuing years. Jobs commented about Sculley: “What can I say? I hired the wrong guy. He destroyed everything I spent 10 years working for, starting with me.” Jobs’ major startup during his hiatus from Apple, NeXT Computer, was largely unsuccessful — at least in the hardware business. His decision to sell all of his Apple stock when Sculley pushed him out cost him billions. And when he came back as CEO, he allowed the backdating of stock options.

In terms of decision processes and style, Jobs was famous for being a tough micro-manager, at least where product design decisions are concerned. As a Fortune magazine article on Apple’s culture put it: “He’s a corporate dictator who makes every critical decision—and oodles of seemingly noncritical calls too, from the design of the shuttle buses that ferry employees to and from San Francisco to what food will be served in the cafeteria.”

He also didn’t believe in analytical decisions based on extensive market research. From The New York Times‘ obituary: ”Mr. Jobs’s own research and intuition, not focus groups, were his guide. When asked what market research went into the iPad, Mr. Jobs replied: “None. It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.”

Based on the evidence, I will grant that he made some fantastic design decisions, but not that he was an expert on effective decision processes.

Granted, there is some evidence that even Jobs came to realize the shortcomings of one man’s intuition as the only source of decision wisdom. In a summary of a 1997 interview, a New York Times article published earlier this year noted: “In his early years at Apple, before he was forced out in 1985, Mr. Jobs was notoriously hands-on, meddling with details and berating colleagues. But later, first at Pixar, the computer-animation studio he co-founded, and in his second stint at Apple, he relied more on others, listening more and trusting members of his design and business teams.”

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Tom Davenport is the President’s Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College and has taught at Harvard Business School, Dartmouth’s Tuck School, the University of Texas, and the University of Chicago. He is a widely published author and speaker on the topics of analytics, information and knowledge management, reengineering, enterprise systems, and electronic business. He has written over 100 articles for such publications as Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, California Management Review, the Financial Times, and many other publications, and has been a columnist for Information Week, CIO, and Darwin magazines. His latest of a dozen books is Judgment Calls: Twelve Stories of Big Decisions and the Teams That Got Them Right, co-authored with Brook Manville and published Harvard Business Review Press (2012). To check out Tom’s other blog posts, please click here.

 

 

7 Vastly Overrated Business Books

Here is an article written by Geoffrey James for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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Most business books are awful, some are mediocre and a (very) few are truly useful.   And then there are business books that aren’t exactly dreadful, but have reputations that have been bloated way out of proportion.

You see them on corporate shelves everywhere and they’re cited at meetings, conferences and seminars, but when you dig a little deeper, and think about their contents, you’re forced to wonder WTF the fuss is all about.

This post identifies some highly popular business books which, in my view, are absurdly overrated.  I’m sure there are many true believers out there who will disagree, but I can’t help but wonder whether somebody hasn’t been drinking some Kool-aid by the gallon.

[Here are the first two. To read the complete article, please click here.]

This book espouses the popular viewpoint that management is mostly a matter of common sense: specific goals, specific praising and and specific reprimands (as a comment below succinctly puts it.)

However, when people think common sense are sufficient for a particular task, they tend not to pay much attention to it, assuming that common sense alone will get them through.  In fact, management is a collection of highly-specialized skills including applied psychology, coaching, business acumen, and system analysis, not to mention an increasing amount of knowledge of computer technology, law and even international relations.

There is no panacea for good management, and it’s certainly not going to be contained in a book that essentially treats management as being easy-peasy.  The belief in common sense as a panacea is always the result of mental laziness. It’s wrongly assumed that a person with “common sense” will make good decisions, while people with real expertise will act like impractical egg-heads. That’s BS.

The result of the “management is just common sense” movement has been nothing less than a rampant epidemic of bad management.  What happens inside most companies (especially at the middle management level) is that the same problems keep coming up month after month, year after year, because managers are relying upon “common sense” to fix them.  It just doesn’t work.

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Back in the day, leaders waited until some kind of independent biographer decided that their accomplishments were worthy of being immortalized in a book.  Today, however, business leaders seem obligated to write self-congratulatory paeans that give new meaning to the word “vomitable.”

What’s even more annoying about this book (and indeed the entire genre) is that it reflects the diseased notion of the “heroic CEO” who singlehandedly causes a company to be successful.  Funny, but I thought that good managers were supposed to give credit to the team, not plaster their face on a book.

The kind of thinking reflected in this book is exactly what results in obscene pay packages for CEOs.  Indeed, Jack Welch was no welcher when it came to awarding himself a panoply of perks. Meanwhile, his vaunted business strategies consisted primarily of downsizing and outsourcing, regardless of the impact that it had on society at large. As for his legacy, he’s left a company where the senior management is evidently proud that the firm, due to lobbying and influence-peddling, didn’t pay any taxes.

It’s amazing to me that anybody takes this kind of self-interested hype seriously, but there’s no lack of imitators.  One wonders when business readers will finally conclude that enough is enough…

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Geoffrey James has sold and written hundreds of features, articles and columns for national publications including Wired, Men’s Health, Business 2.0, SellingPower, Brand World, Computer Gaming World, CIO, The New York Times and (of course) BNET. He is the author of seven books, including Business Wisdom of the Electronic Elite (translated into seven languages and selected by four book clubs), and The Tao of Programming (widely quoted on the Web as a “canonical book of computer humor”.) He was also co-host of Funny Business, a program on New England’s largest all-talk radio station and has given seminars and keynotes at numerous corporations, including Rackspace, Gartner, Lucent and Houston Industries.

The 6 Toxic Beliefs That Lousy Bosses Love

Here is an article written by Geoffrey James for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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Why are there so many lousy bosses in this world? Simple.  These six toxic beliefs have taken hold in the business world, and they’re turning otherwise sane individuals into raging management jackasses.

This post describes those 6 toxic beliefs so that you can protect yourself against them, primarily by avoiding those managers who hold them dear.
Be forewarned, though.  If some of these beliefs make sense to you, you might very well be on the road to becoming a lousy boss yourself.

[Here are the first two of the six. To read the complete article, please click here.]

TOXIC BELIEF #1: “We are a meritocracy.”

You hear this all the time inside high tech firms, and it’s becoming increasingly common elsewhere, too.  The idea is that management only awards promotions and salary increases as the result of proven performance.  That’s the theory.  But it’s total BS.

The idea of a “meritocracy” ignores that many other factors influence who gets what inside a corporation.  For example, tall men and pretty women have an inside track that’s purely genetic and has nothing whatsoever to do with their actual contributions.

Similarly, many employees enter a company with pre-existing connections, both through colleagues and family members.  A son with minimal talent takes over his father’s job. An executive comes in at the top and pulls a bunch of his cronies in with him.  Somebody has an affair with the CFO and then becomes the chief auditor.  (This actually happened to somebody I know).  Deals are cut between drinking buddies.  Talent has little or nothing to do with it.

Beyond that, the corporate world is full of toadies and lickspittles whose sole ability to survive and thrive is based upon an unerring sense of who in the corporate structure needs periodic sphincter osculations.

Even if those factors were absent from the corporate milieu (which they’re decidedly not), the Peter Principle still remains valid.  As anyone who looks at any business carefully can tell you, people are FREQUENTLY promoted to their level of incompetence, where they remain for years.

The reason that this belief is so toxic?  People who are lucky, connected, or oily use the “meritocracy” belief to justify the fact that they’ve gotten ahead.  It makes them feel that they “deserve” their success, and therefore owe nothing to anybody else.

Back in the day when belonging to an aristocracy meant automatic advantages, they had a concept called noblesse oblige.  Aristocrats knew that they didn’t really deserve their privileges, so they felt obligated to treat the hoi polloi with a modicum of kindness and restraint.

Not so the meritocrats.  Once they get ahead, they rapidly become insufferable snobs who complain about government regulation and quote Ayn Rand.

How vomitable.

TOXIC BELIEF #2: “I must control employees.”

The idea that the role of management is to control employee behavior is common, but that doesn’t make it right.

We’ve been told for so many years that managers are supposed to be “in charge” that any other definition of management seems absurd or naive. All too often, well-meaning managers try to control their way out of problems, control the behavior of the people who work with them, control events that are going to happen whether they like it or not.

But thinking of management as control misses the entire point (and real power) of management. Ideally, a manager should be a servant, coach and mentor to the people who work inside the group. The goal of the manager is to make everyone else in the group successful, and thereby make the group success. You can’t “control” that outcome. It’s just not possible

The reason this belief is ugly that it leads organization to concentrate power at the top. It causes the proliferation of complicated rules and regulations, the growth of bureaucracies, and the need for expensive reporting mechanisms to pass information up and down the management chain.

Even so, the need to control can be very seductive. The illusion that we can bend other people’s hearts and minds and get them to do exactly what we want is a comforting one in a world that’s admittedly chaotic. What’s most dangerous about “control” is that it works-at least for a while, but it eventually creates massive resentment.

The controlling person looks around the conference table one day and finds that he or she is surrounded by enemies-people who would stab the controlling manager in the back, if given half a chance. So the manager comes up with some new way to control or manipulate, while the employees continue to maneuver and posture to avoid the heavy hand of management.

And so the cycle continues.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Geoffrey James

Geoffrey James has sold and written hundreds of features, articles and columns for national publications including Wired, Men’s Health, Business 2.0, SellingPower, Brand World, Computer Gaming World, CIO, The New York Times and (of course) BNET. He is the author of seven books, including Business Wisdom of the Electronic Elite (translated into seven languages and selected by four book clubs), and The Tao of Programming (widely quoted on the Web as a “canonical book of computer humor”.) He was also co-host of Funny Business, a program on New England’s largest all-talk radio station.

The Greatest Marketing Geniuses of All Time

Here is an article written by Geoffrey James for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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Marketing talent is rare enough, but marketing genius only happens once or twice in a lifetime. Here are more than a dozen men and women throughout history who changed the face of marketing, creating entirely new concepts, or bringing good ideas to full fruition.  

If you think you might be a marketing genius, or just wish you were one, these are the luminaries whose thinking processes you should learn to emulate.  Although, in some cases, you might want to pick a different industry than the ones these geniuses chose.

[Actually, here are five of the 16. To read the complete article, please click here.]

John R. Brinkley, Inventor of Broadcast Advertising

Hard to believe it now, but radio was once originally considered akin to a public library, a cultural asset free of commercials.

All of that changed when Quack Physician John Brinkley built his own radio station in 1923 to hype his cure for male impotence, which consisted of implanting goat testicles in the human body.

Brinkley combined entertainment (booking some of the great country music acts of his day), bible readings, and a strong sense for the memorable turn of phrase.  His most memorable catch phrase: “You’ll be a ram-what-am… with every lamb.”

Now THAT’s infotainment!

Mary Kay Ash, Inventor of Network Marketing.

Network marketing (recruiting independent-agents to serve as distributors of goods and services, and then encouraging them to build and manage their own sales force) had been around for several decades when Mary Kay Ash founded her world famous cosmetics firm in 1963.

But older companies, like Amway and Weight Watchers, failed to do what Mary Kay did: turn the network marketing concept from something on the fringe into an integral part of America’s middle-class culture.
She did this by tapping a great underutilized workforce: the housewives who were sick of the June Cleaver act, but didn’t want a traditional 9 to 5 job.

Her most brilliant move: awarding top sellers pink Cadillacs, thereby transforming them into mobile advertisements for the company’s products.  Beautiful.

George Wilkes, Inventor of Eye Candy

The journalist George Wilkes, along with his friend Enoch Camp, founded the world’s first girlie magazine, National Police Gazette, way back in 1845.

The Gazette was packaged as a trade magazine for law enforcement, but featured numerous engravings and photographs of scantily-clad actresses, strippers and prostitutes.

These pictures were often facing pages of advertisements, which in those days were dull by comparison.

Later, of course, the eye candy ended up in the ads, but Wilkes was the first to use sex to sell an unrelated product.

Andre Citroen, Inventor of the Electric Billboard

The founder of the Citroen automobile firm was always something of marketing genius.  He was one of the first auto execs to sponsor car races, for instance, and he promoted his car plant to tourists as “the most beautiful in Europe.”

However, his real masterwork was renting the Eiffel Tower in 1925 and having the Citroen brand name emblazoned with in 125,000 incandescent lights. The sign remained in place until the company went bankrupt in 1934, partly because of the incredibly high electricity bills.  (The first act of the new owners was to flip the off switch.)

The lesson here: no matter how brilliant the marketing, it’s got to pay for itself somehow.

Conrad Gessner, Inventor of Viral Marketing

Viral marketing consists of creating a trend that carries along by word of mouth, creating demand for a product that previously wasn’t on anybody’s radar screen.

People tend to think of it as an Internet phenomenon, but it’s actually far older.  Some scholars believe it began way back in 1559, when the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner waxed lyrical about the beauties of the tulip — a flower then not well known in Europe.

His remarks eventually spawned (in 1634… thing move a bit slower without the Web) what’s now known as “Tulipmania.”  During the craze, some bulbs sold for the contemporary equivalent of several million dollars.

One tulip fancier actually murdered his manservant for eating a particularly prized bulb, believing it to be an onion.

Now, that’s brand loyalty with a vengeance!

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Geoffrey James

Geoffrey James has sold and written hundreds of features, articles and columns for national publications including Wired, Men’s Health, Business 2.0, SellingPower, Brand World, Computer Gaming World, CIO and The New York Times. He is the author of seven books, including Business Wisdom of the Electronic Elite and The Tao of Programming.

Selling to Top Execs: 10 Easy Rules

Geoffrey James

Here is an article written by Geoffrey James for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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Sales professionals want to “call high”, but often they’re confused about what to do or say when they finally get a meeting with a bigwig.

Fortunately, it’s not all that complicated, if you follow ten easy rules.

[Here are five. To read the complete article, please click here.]

RULE #1: Do your homework. Prior to the meeting, research the exec’s “business agenda” and try to ascertain his or her “personal agenda” as well. You’ll want to address both during your first meeting.

RULE #2: Don’t assume context. While the meeting is a huge deal to you, it’s probably not for the exec.  Don’t assume he knows why you’re there.  Introduce yourself. Explain the meeting’s purpose.

RULE #3: Get to business. Executives are busy folk. Don’t try to schmooze or talk about sports unless the exec initiates the conversation.

RULE #4: Prove your value. Within the first few minutes, demonstrate you have done your homework and understand the company, its challenges and its place in the industry.

RULE #5: Focus on business issues. Make the conversation about how you can help the exec achieve the two agendas (see Rule #1).   Do not attempt to wow an exec with “bells and whistles.”  It won’t work.

The above is based on a conversation with Dr. Steve Bistritz and Nicholas A.C. Read, authors of the bestselling book Selling to the C-Suite.  They interviewed several hundred executives and figured out what they wanted from the sales professionals who call on them.

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Geoffrey James has sold and written hundreds of features, articles and columns for national publications including Wired, Men’s Health, Business 2.0, SellingPower, Brand World, Computer Gaming World, CIO, The New York Times and (of course) BNET. He is the author of seven books, including Business Wisdom of the Electronic Elite (translated into seven languages and selected by four book clubs), and The Tao of Programming (widely quoted on the Web as a “canonical book of computer humor”.) He was also co-host of Funny Business, a program on New England’s largest all-talk radio station.

The 5 Dumbest Management Concepts of All Time

Geoffrey James

Here is an article written by Geoffrey James for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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It’s a truism that “nothing is certain in this world except death, taxes and bad management.”  But why?  Why does bad management remain so pervasive, even after decades of MBA courses, millions of management books, and billions spent on management training?

The root of the problem lies in five basic management concepts that became popular in the 20th century and continue to propagate stupidity.  As long as the business world kowtows to these obsolete management concepts, we’ll be plagued by managers who screw up.

Some of these concepts are dearly held panaceas for much of the business world.  Even so, they were ill-considered and ill-conceived from the start, and should be jettisoned for the good of everybody.

[Here are the first two. To read the complete article, please click here.]

Dumb Concept #1: “Downsizing”

Thousands upon thousands of articles in the mainstream business press characterize CEOs as “courageous” because they instituted a downsizing.  Apparently, the decision to fire people is so difficult, that the CEO who takes that path must be a brave and lonely soul.  He’s putting the interests of the investors ahead of his own kindhearted inclinations, and making the difficult decisions that will allow the company to remain profitable.

But, wait a minute, Chester!  How, exactly, did the company get into a situation where it needed to fire people in order to remain competitive? Sure, markets change like crazy in today’s world and business conditions become challenging.  But isn’t it the job of the CEO and the management team to predict those changes, and to staff the company appropriately, and retrain people, so that those challenges can be addressed?

Here’s the truth.  Downsizing is a sign of failure.  It means that management has failed and rather than doing the right thing — which is to quit without severance — they’re passing along the penalty for that failure to the people who, in good faith, tried to execute the flawed strategy that top management pursued.

That’s why top managers (and the kiss-butt journalists in the mainstream business press) love the word “downsizing.”  It makes the results of failure sound like a strategy, rather than a desperate way to remain profitable after top management has made a complete pig’s breakfast of thing.

So, as we go forward, let’s stop calling it downsizing.  Let’s call it what it is: firing productive workers because top management  was a bunch of overpaid pinhead losers who shouldn’t be allowed to run a company again.

Dumb Concept #2: “Leadership”

A few years before he died, Peter Drucker was interviewed on NPR.  In that interview, he pointed out what should be obvious to everyone — that all this talk about “leadership” is a bunch of horse manure.

Yeah, yeah, the idea of leadership sounds neat — especially if you’re in management — and it makes a manager sound all charismatic and exciting.

But what is a “leader,” anyway?   What does a “leader” do?

I can’t hear the term without thinking of the leader of a marching band.  That’s the person who takes a big stick and makes it go up and down, while the band does the work of actually making the music.

One reason I think of that image is that, in my experience, most of the time the “leader” of the team is the person who found a parade and then got out in front of it.  (I once heard an executive in Fortune 50 company describe that odious behavior as “smart business practice.”)

The concept of a “leader” means that credit for what the team does goes to the leader.  And you see it every day, in the bloated salaries paid to “business leaders” and in the ridiculous way that some CEOs parade themselves as if they were rock stars.

You see it in the lower levels, too, where managers bloviate about leadership and “inspiring” people, when in fact they’re usually just making everyone under them want to puke.

What Drucker said — and I agree with him — is that the business world doesn’t need leaders. It needs managers — people who can actually manage a team of people.

Being a manager means being in service to the team.  It means giving the team credit and making everyone else successful.

So, as we go forward, let’s stop enabling all these tin-pot “leaders” by pretending that they’re doing anything other than grandstanding.  Let’s value the real managers, who actually do the hard (and largely thankless) work of making other people productive.

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Geoffrey James has sold and written hundreds of features, articles and columns for national publications including Wired, Men’s Health, Business 2.0, SellingPower, Brand World, Computer Gaming World, CIO, The New York Times and (of course) BNET. He is the author of seven books, including Business Wisdom of the Electronic Elite (translated into seven languages and selected by four book clubs), and The Tao of Programming (widely quoted on the Web as a “canonical book of computer humor”.) He was also co-host of Funny Business.

How To Find the REAL Decision-Maker

Geoffrey James

Here is an introduction and link to an article written by Geoffrey James for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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Corporations have complex power structures.  It’s not always clear who makes the decisions, and how they get made.  In many firms, even middle management isn’t sure exactly how decision are made, which presents a huge challenge for a sales professional.

If you’re developing a complex deal that involves something new (a new type of automation process for instance), it can be difficult to identify the exact senior executive who should be heavily involved evaluating, deciding or approving the decision.

Most sales professionals wrongly believe that the decision-maker is the person who has final sign-off.  But that’s actually naive.  The real decision-maker is going to be the person who will care enough to put your project into motion and who has enough influence to make sure that the purchase actually goes through.

This REAL decision-maker will have direct involvement, influence and vested interest in a venture’s successful outcome, plus sufficient rank and power to affect the results.

To find this holy grail of B2B selling, simply research the firm (on the Web and through interviews) to discover the person with the following six characteristics:

1.    A job title that is relevant to the area that your offering addresses.
2.    A position on the org chart that is relevant to the area your offering addresses.
3.    A history of being a successful leader within the organization, implementing similar projects.
4.    A reputation among other executives in the firm as a genuine contributor to the firm.
5.    A reputation for being closely bound to others in the organization “by mutual advantage.”
6.    Sufficient influence to control company events and activities and to alter the firm’s status quo.

The individual who has all those characteristics is the REAL decision-maker for your offering.  This is the person whom you must contact, cultivate and work with to make sure that your offering actually gets purchased.

The above is based upon a conversation with Dr. Steve Bistritz and Nicholas A.C. Read, authors of the HUGE bestseller Selling to the C-Suite.

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Geoffrey James has sold and written hundreds of features, articles and columns for national publications including Wired, Men’s Health, Business 2.0, SellingPower, Brand World, Computer Gaming World, CIO, The New York Times and (of course) BNET. He is the author of seven books, including Business Wisdom of the Electronic Elite (translated into seven languages and selected by four book clubs), and The Tao of Programming (widely quoted on the Web as a “canonical book of computer humor”.) He was also co-host of Funny Business, a program on New England’s largest all-talk radio station.

 

How to Achieve a Winning Attitude in 6 Easy Steps

Geoffrey James

Here is an article written by Geoffrey James for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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A positive attitude – optimism, expectancy and enthusiasm – is the key difference between a top sales performer and an average one.  The reason is simple: if you don’t have the energy to get out there and sell… you won’t.

Even so, many sales professionals find it difficult to approach selling with a positive attitude each and every day.  This post explains exactly how to tune your attitude so that it creates more success — every time you go out there and sell.

CLICK here for the first step.

NOTE: This post is based upon a conversation with the dynamic Jeff Keller, author of the huge bestseller Attitude is Everything.

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Geoffrey James has sold and written hundreds of features, articles and columns for national publications including Wired, Men’s Health, Business 2.0, SellingPower, Brand World, Computer, Gaming World, CIO, The New York Times and (of course) BNET. He is the author of seven books, including Business Wisdom of the Electronic Elite (translated into seven languages and selected by four book clubs), and The Tao of Programming (widely quoted on the Web as a “canonical book of computer humor”.) He was also co-host of Funny Business, a program on New England’s largest all-talk radio station.

Top 10 Funny TV Ads of 2010

Here is an introduction and link to an article written by Geoffrey James for for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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A good advertisement needs to be entertaining, so that people will watch it.  One of the most powerful ways to make an ad entertaining is to make it funny.

That’s especially true when the economy is bad.  When people are hurting, they want escape, and there are few emotions that provide a better escape than laughter.

With that in mind, here are the ten funniest TV ads of 2010, based largely upon how many people have viewed them.  If you haven’t seen them, you’re in a good chuckle…and some of them are definitely ROLF fodder.

Please click here to see the first.

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Geoffrey James

Geoffrey James has sold and written hundreds of features, articles and columns for national publications including Wired, Men’s Health, Business 2.0, SellingPower, Brand World, Computer Gaming World, CIO, The New York Times and (of course) BNET. He is the author of seven books, including Business Wisdom of the Electronic Elite (translated into seven languages and selected by four book clubs), and The Tao of Programming (widely quoted on the Web as a “canonical book of computer humor”.) He was also co-host of Funny Business, a program on New England’s largest all-talk radio station.

Geoffrey James on “Office Nut Cases: A Field Guide”

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Geoffrey James for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To read the complete article and/or obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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If you’ve been around an office for any time at all, you’ve run into one of those certifiable nut cases who makes you (and everyone around you) miserable. Not to worry.  Identifying a nut case is half the battle, because then you can avoid, ignore or neutralize.  Knowledge truly is power.

To help you spot these workplace whack jobs, the brilliant and charming Sylvia Lafair has written a book, Don’t Bring It To Work; Breaking the Family Patterns that Limit Success. In it, she shows you how to identify and deal with the most common offenders.  She calls them “behavior patterns” rather than “nut cases” and has all sorts of good advice for dealing with them.

But I call ‘em nut cases, and this post describes the 13 types that Lafair says are most common in the workaday world.  This is information no serious professional (sales or otherwise) should be without.

[Here are the first two of the 13, adapted from Lafair’s book. Click here.]

THE SUPER-ACHIEVER

NUT CASE #1: THE SUPER-ACHIEVER

Super achievers must excel at everything that they do… to the point of obnoxiousness.  Not only do they achieve every conventional measure of career success, but their families must look picture perfect.  “Happy” is not a word used by super achievers; the only word that matters is “successful.”

Super achievers see themselves as special and they want to be treated as such.  They continually inflate themselves often at the expense of others.  Super achievers hate criticism and will endlessly defend, explain or justify in order to prove that they are right and others are wrong.

If the super achiever is a peer, no matter how competent you are, you’ll walk away from an encounter needed to shake off an uncomfortable sense of incompetence.  If you report to a super achiever, one of two things is bound to happen.  Either you will sit at the feet of the star or you will be constantly told that your ideas are second rank.  If you oversee a super achiever, expect underhanded maneuvers to get you fired.

Super achievers breed fear and resentment. Everyone begins to guard ideas and an uncomfortable sense of paranoia grows.  Initially, a super achiever will charm certain individuals who look as if they can be the best stepping stones.  But over time a slew of bruised egos accumulate and by the time the rest of the team what realizes what has happened, the super achiever has been promoted.

THE REBEL

NUT CASE #2: THE REBEL

The rebel is a born fighter.  Their animosity is almost always against authority figures, social protocols, or company rules and regulations.  Rebels come in wearing jeans on a Tuesday when the casual day is Friday.  They miss deadlines or arrive late to work just to prove they don’t have to follow the rules.

Rebels do these things because they thrive on negative attention, seeing it as the only way to get noticed. Rebels often strike colleagues as emotionally closed and hyper vigilant. Rebels claim to strive for change yet they have not done their deeper homework.  They will take on a cause without really understanding the implications of their actions.

If you have a classic rebel on your team, watch out!  About the only thing he or she loves more than throwing gasoline on a smoldering fire is getting others to do the same.  The moment rebels hear of discontent, they will go to great lengths to convince others they should go to HR or get legal advice.

Most companies cannot tolerate rebels for very long which is why rebels are often sent to communication programs or anger management seminars. Rebels also get fired or quit their jobs, typically leaving with a tremendous amount of fanfare.  Rebels are willing to prove a point regardless of consequences and this can easily damage communities, teams and companies.

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Geoffrey James has sold and written hundreds of features, articles and columns for national publications including Wired, Men’s Health, Business 2.0, SellingPower, Brand World, Computer Gaming World, CIO, The New York Times and (of course) BNET. He is the author of seven books, including Business Wisdom of the Electronic Elite and The Tao of Programming. He was also co-host of Funny Business, a program on New England’s largest all-talk radio station.