I Love Me, Don’t Care About You

It is interesting to analyze folks who “make it to the top.” Assuming a modicum of intelligence and the necessary drive, what attributes generate the CEOs and Wall Street mavens that earn the biggest bucks and makes the biggest and baddest decisions at the top of the business ladders? Sheryl Sandberg, former Google executive and now Facebook, Inc’s. chief operating officer, looked at the fact there have been more women college graduates than men for a very long time in the United States, but that there are woefully few women at the top of corporate America. In her recently released book, Leaning In, Sandberg notes how women who take charge are pejoratively labeled as “bossy,” while men with the same proclivity are blessed with “leadership potential.”

But there may be a deeper, more sinister reason, perhaps rooted in Darwinian evolutionary power. As nurturers and child-bearers, women need to be empathetic to fulfill their roles in motherhood. Caring for others is one of the most basic requirements of having children, and nature seems to make sure that all but those most mentally impaired women are provided with this extraordinary gift. In corporate America, it seems, empathy can be fatal. So let’s look at the opposite, extreme, folks without empathy, and see how they fare in America’s vicious corporate world.

A very, very small number of people in our society, about three million according to FastCompany.com (March 11^th), are psychopathic, that is they really lack empathy or the ability to accept moral responsibility for their actions: “Psychopaths are also likely to be narcissistic (self-loving) or to have a Machiavellian streak (detachment, liking for games-playing). These days, more and more people are ‘triadic’ says British psychologist Oliver James--meaning the people in your office have all three disorders at the same time.” Yep, “in your office.” FastCompany.com estimates that people with such mental disorders who represent well under one percent of the general population are overrepresented at the top of Wall Street with a one in ten statistic.

When you realize that Wall Streeters created volumes and volumes of bundled subprime mortgages and complex derivatives and credit default swaps that really sold aggregated “bad deals” to even sophisticated institutional buyers – even creating opposing and hedging derivatives to protect themselves from the obvious risks – you begin to understand the underlying truth of that of pervasive psychopathic behavior on the Street. That the experts had the numbers to know that what they were doing was not economically justified made matters infinitely worse.  They just didn’t care if society imploded from their behavior as long as they made money.

Add the manipulation of the LIBOR interbank lending rate, money laundering of corrupt cartel and terrorist-state money, wrongful foreclosures and misleading lending practices and you understand why Wall Street seems capable of generating actions on a mass scale sufficient to bring down even a global economy, without a care in the world. Bad result? Blame others. Take government bailout money without a blink. Kill a few sacrificial lambs and get back to business as usual. James’ book,Office Politics, admonishes office workers to learn how to deal with these manipulative office-demons before they “eat you for breakfast.”

“James interviews 50 people, including narcissists, psychopaths and Machiavels, and people who play office politics well. For example, James profiles a New York broker who deceives his boss into thinking he understands a complex financial instrument (it sounds familiar). The broker’s method is to use phrases like ‘correlation co-efficient’ (that we think we might understand, but don’t), and drop that he has an old-money background. ‘Jan’ a respected professor, has a second-rate mind, but ‘a great talent for acquiring, and taking credit for, others’ ideas.’

“James says people need four skills for office politics:

• Astuteness: ‘being able to read others, your organization, and yourself’ (helps size up the lay of the land)
• Effectiveness: finding the right tactics, and ‘choosing the right moment and performing the words and deeds effectively, always with … deliberate pretenses and acting’
• Networking: maintaining relationships, so you have allies, and can move into another position, if necessary
• The Appearance of Sincerity: you want to be yourself. But sometimes you create an impression that just seems sincere.

“In other words, you need to be just a little like the triads to work among triads. ‘The people who are pious and say ‘I don’t believe in that kind of thing’ are just lying to themselves,’ says James. ‘We are all office politicians. One in five communications are untrue.’” FastCompany.com. Oy, what a series of recommendations. Self-esteem is essential, but narcissism can kill… us. Might I suggest another approach? Increase the regulatory oversight of this callous component of our society and put pressure on corporate America to move more women to the top of our financial hierarchy! As a society, we cannot afford to allow uncaring people with mental disorders to guide our future anymore.

I’m Peter Dekom, and this all may seem a bit humorous… until you really think about it.