【大西洋月刊 201506】混蛋的代价

满仓

【中文标题】混蛋的代价
【原文标题】Why It Pays to Be a Jerk
【登载媒体】大西洋月刊
【原文作者】Jerry Useem
【原文链接】http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/06/why-it-pays-to-be-a-jerk/392066/




向客户微笑；为同事们烤饼干；赞美你的下属；不居功；认真倾听；表示同情心；把最后一个甜甜圈留给别人。

嘲笑客户；别放过打搅同事的机会；把功劳揽在自己身上；抢着说话；把脚放在桌子上；迟迟不批准下属的申请；营造恐怖气氛；打断别人；贪得无厌；不管你用什么办法，把最后一个甜甜圈抢到手，这是你应得的。

成功的故事告诉我们，遵循上面的某一条路，你会飞黄腾达。跟着另一条路走，你死都不知道怎么死的。问题是，究竟是哪条路？

在所有占据了现代人头脑的问题中——先天还是后天？外星有生命存在吗？为什么美国不能组建一支顶尖的足球队？——很难想象竟然有一个问题如此频繁地出现在人们茶余饭后的谈资中，又如此地缺乏科学论证。做好人有用吗？或者说，做一个混蛋有什么好处？

有太多耳熟能详的警句指引我们走上其中一条道路。彬彬有礼还是不择手段（“被人怕比被人爱好多了”）、戴尔•卡耐基（“真诚地赞美他人”）和里奥•杜罗切（他或许说过“好人永远最落后”这句话）。近年来，《善意的力量》和《黑暗的另一面》这类书籍继续同样的调调——结论太多、证据太少。

于是，当2013年出现了一本真正让数据进入数据库的书时，就像呼吸到一股新鲜的空气。作者，33岁的沃顿商学院教授亚当•格兰特和他的畅销书《给予和索取：帮助他人来推动我们成功》提供了一些证据来证明，“给予者”——分享时间或知识并且不求回报的人——占据了他们所在领域的顶端位置。格兰特写到：“这种模式全行业通用”，从加利福尼亚州的工程师，到北卡罗拉纳州的销售员，到比利时的医学院学生。书中掺杂着无私行为的轶事和霍雷肖•阿尔杰式的情节，碰巧得到了回报，同时推动了个人事业的发展。这本书似乎是把整个商业氛围推向一种更愉快、“好人永远第一”的境界。

但与此同时，反面的一些见解依然存在，而且在另外一本书——沃尔特•艾萨克森的《乔布斯传》——的鼓动下有愈演愈烈之势。汤姆•麦克尼克尔在《大西洋月刊》网站上撰文，说普通的读者看完这本书或许会想：“看啊！史蒂夫•乔布斯是个大混蛋！却成为地球上最成功的商人。或许我变得比他更混蛋，也能像史蒂夫一样成功。”

麦克尼克尔不是唯一持这种论调的人。在《乔布斯传》出版之后，斯坦福大学教授罗伯特•撒顿说：“至少在十次与各公司高管的谈话中，他们问我：‘你难道不觉得我应该更不讲理一点吗？’”他的一本书《论浑人》中有一个章节，名叫“浑人的美德”。

由于缺少亚当•格兰特把所有零碎情节串联在一起的能力，支持这种相反论调的证据似乎有些零散，但它们的确存在。

在阿姆斯特丹大学，研究人员发现，令人不快的行为不但会让一个人显得更强大，而且会真的让这个人变得强大。过分自信也是如此。一系列的研究发现，在一群人面前做出你是最聪明的表现，这个群体由你主导的机会就大大增加。人们甚至愿意为受支配的地位付出代价：傲慢、居高临下的奢侈品店员要比那些和蔼可亲的店员有更好的销售业绩。另外一些研究显示，“令人愉快”的品质似乎会让你的物质收入少得可怜。斯坦福商学院的教授杰弗里•菲菲尔说：“我们都认为，应该让那些具有谦虚、真诚等正面品质的人成为领导者，但是却发现，那些被我们归类为负面的品质——比如傲慢——却成为预测高收入和领导者职位的可靠依据。”

菲菲尔有点担心他的MBA学生们：“大部分学生都有一个问题，就是他们都太善良了。”

他讲了一个故事。从前的一个学生来办公室找他，他刚刚被一家创业公司扫地出门，原因竟然在于——菲菲尔用不可思议的口气说——他自己聘请来的斯坦福大学的校友导师。菲菲尔问，有什么先兆吗？学生说有，他没有听从其他创业伙伴的意见，因为他觉得这位导师的确是硅谷的重量级人物，不会为他的小生意费神。

菲菲尔问他：“你觉得，如果把一条巨蟒和一只鸡关在笼子里，会发生什么？”学生对这个问题毫无头绪：“巨蟒会问那是什么鸡吗？”“不，巨蟒会毫不犹豫地吃掉那只鸡！那位导师恰恰就是这么做的，她把你这种人当作早餐。”

按照格兰特的理论，故事中的导师可以被归类为“索取者”，这让我们的发现变得更加复杂。给予者不仅仅占据了各行业最顶端的位置，同时也基本占据了最底端的位置，原因就是他们太容易被索取者剥削了。这个细节往往被畅销书所忽略掉，他对我说：“我曾是拥护‘善良有好报’理论的人。”

《给予和索取》试图细致地区分成功的给予者和“炮灰”给予者（其中的精妙之处我们会详细讨论），但它并没有考虑如何区分成功的混蛋——比如史蒂夫•乔布斯——和失败的混蛋，比如……呃，还是史蒂夫•乔布斯，他在1985年被自己聘请的导师赶出创业公司。

事实在于，老子天下第一的态度在某些职业场所非常有市场，就像无私的行为在其它场所极受欢迎一样。问题在于，尤其是对那些试图寻求指引的人来说，如何才能正确地区分这两种行为？


史蒂夫•乔布斯

2008年夏天，加利福尼亚州一个海滩吸引了一位冲浪爱好者兰斯，我们其实应该感谢这个人。兰斯觉得每个浪头都应该是属于他的，所以当另一个冲浪者艾伦•詹姆斯用娴熟的技巧驾驭了一个浪头时，就像在他之前和之后的一些人一样，他得到了一些与母亲有关的恶毒咒骂。

“真是个浑球。”詹姆斯捡起自己的冲浪板，心中这么想。

亚里士多德之后的哲学家对于生物分类都很着迷，在哈佛大学获得哲学博士学位、目前在加利福尼亚大学任教的詹姆斯也不例外。他想到，我说“浑球”，到底是什么意思？

詹姆斯设法精确定义这个概念，最终在2012年出版了他的书《浑球：一个理论》。书中正式明确了浑球的概念：1，用系统的方法让自己占据特殊的优势；2，与传统的实至名归理论有所不同；3，对他人的抱怨不做理会。

“浑球”与“变态”的区别在于，浑球有自己的逻辑。（他知道人们有一些权利，只不过这些权利被他用来当作占据优势的手段。）这种逻辑是具有连贯性的，并非偶发的，但缺陷在于浑球（asshole）与傻瓜（ass）之间模糊的界限。（语言学或许可以识别出概念上的区别，ass来自拉丁语assinus，意为“驴子”；hole来自中世纪英语，希泰语“臀部”的意思。）

詹姆斯并没有重点阐述浑球是否真正得到了实惠。我把他的理论与宾夕法尼亚大学管理学教授唐纳德•汉布里克分享，他告诉我，这听起来与经典心理学对于自恋的定义“几乎相同”。在与艾里吉•查特尔吉合作的一项研究中，汉布里克捕捉了一些公司高管的这种性格特征，然后与他们公司的业绩相比对。

汉布里克说，对自恋程度的衡量很复杂。自我评价并不足信，于是他选择了一些间接指标：每个CEO的照片在公司年度报告中占据的位置、CEO的薪资与他们在公司中直接下属薪资的差距、公司发布的新闻稿中CEO名字出现的频率。他还研究CEO在出席新闻发布会时使用代词的频率，也就是第一人称复数与第一人称单数出现的频率。把所有这些结果综合起来，得出了一个自恋系数。

这些自恋者的命运如何？汉布里克坦承他“报有一丝希望”看到这些人把他们的公司带到阴沟里，“我们都盼望这样的结果——因果报应、算总账嘛。”但是，他发现自恋者就像格兰特所描述的给予者一样，他们分布在成功谱系的两端。

汉布里克不请愿地承认，U型分布图似乎证明“所谓的‘成功的自恋者’概念的确存在”。他发现，自恋的CEO就像赌徒，与普通的CEO相比较，他们会做出更多的高调兼并决定（目的是用持续不断的赞扬声满足自恋的需求）。部分声势庞大的冒险的确取得了成功，也有一些失败的例子。但是，“在商业环境中，创新和冒险永远是供不应求的举动，”——这一点很少有人会反对——“因此自恋者是走向成功的最佳人选。”

当然，这里面并没有提到自恋者（或者索取者、混蛋）当初是如何走上高层的位子的。格兰特认为，很多索取者擅于在潜在的施惠者面前隐藏自己丑恶的一面——就是所谓的“媚上欺下”，很多研究都表明，索取者在有机会提拔自己的上司面前是一副嘴脸，对待同僚和下属又是另一副嘴脸。但这个故事并不完整。实际上，不加掩饰的恶行通常会为你铺就升迁的通途。

请想象下面这两个场景。第一个场景是，一个人在阿姆斯特丹街头户外的咖啡馆找到一张椅子坐下，仔细地看过菜单，把它放回桌子上，然后点燃一支烟。当侍者过来取菜单时，他礼貌性地点头示意，说：“可以给我一份素食三明治和一杯加糖的咖啡吗？谢谢。”

第二个场景，相同的一个人在阿姆斯特丹街头同样的咖啡馆坐下。他把脚放在旁边的一张椅子上，烟灰随意弹在地上。看完菜单之后顺手丢在桌子上，嘴里咕哝着：“呃，给我来一份素三明治和一杯加糖咖啡。”眼睛望着远方，然后在鞋底捻灭了香烟。

作为2001年的一项旨在调查“违背常规”的研究中，荷兰研究人员上演并拍摄了这样的场景。这项调查最早出现在1972年，结果显示权力引发腐败，或者至少出现失控的迹象。大权在握的人更有可能从盘子里抓起最后一块饼干，放在嘴里大嚼，碎屑乱迸。他们更会呈现出用老眼光看人、目中无人、打断说话、忽视别人的感受、入侵私人空间、居功自傲的行为。这项研究的负责人杰本•范•克里夫告诉我：“但是我们依然希望事实不是这样。”他希望可以了解，打破常规的行为是否可以帮助人们走上权力的台阶。

他的确找到了相关的证据。视频中无视道德规范的那个人，在旁观者看来，比彬彬有礼的人更像是掌权者。在包括其它类似场景的跟进调查中，参与者对此的回应包括“我更希望这个人做我的老板”和“我会给这个人升职”。必须要强调，这种测试必须在正确的环境中进行。但是不管怎样，不守规矩的人掌权的可能性更大。

范•克里夫说：“如果你问我，那么这方面的研究少得可怜。”但是领导力演化的新方向似乎能为我们指明一条道路。研究人员试图搞清楚的问题并不是为什么有人敢推翻传统道德规范，而是为什么还有人不这么做。



人类历史上——或者说史前时代——有那么一段时期，成为恶霸是通往领导地位的唯一道路。西北大学克罗格商学院的进化心理学家乔恩•曼尼尔说，我们通过推理得出这样的结论。除人类之外的所有物种内部的权势等级，都是通过强壮度这个唯一的标准来决定的。看似温顺的海豚也是如此，它们用牙齿和背鳍所进行的打斗体现了霍布斯的“所有人参与的战争”理论。甚至我们的近亲黑猩猩也是如此。

加利福尼亚大学戴维斯分校的社会学家罗伯特•法里斯说：“在动物界，胜利和失败不难理解。”如果你给一群黑猩猩放映《铁窗喋血》（还没有人这么做过），在监狱拳击赛那场戏中，它们可以轻松判断出谁会获胜，绰号“挖掘机”的大块头反派把卢克打得满地找牙。但是下一个场景就让黑猩猩们摸不着头脑了，失败者卢克竟然成为了犯人们的新领袖。

人类观众或许可以试图解释其中的原委。因为即使卢克被打倒，但他一次又一次地爬起来，赢得了犯人的尊重。但黑猩猩理解不了。法里斯说：“这就是人类的复杂性，”人类和黑猩猩在进化的道路上分道扬镳，才出现了食物链顶端独特的人类。学者称其为“威望”。

当我们的祖先获得了用知识做交易的能力之后，威望就出现了。一个并不强壮的猿人懂得用更好的方法找到浆果、会更快地生火，或者会设下陷阱捕捉羚羊，那么用现在的观点来看，他在族群中就不会处于受制的地位，而是会吸引来一些人，用威望来换取他的能力。与恐惧感造就的支配地位不同，威望的授予具有广泛的自由度。但一旦威望形成，它会决定性地改变权力的走向：5个普通体型的猿人联合起来，就可以打败最强壮的敌人。因此，“谁掌权”这个问题就被添加进了更加复杂的因素“需要谁”。

能力造就权力这个概念在学术界毫无争议，如果这个说法不对，那么《伊利亚特》的开篇就不会讲述希腊最伟大的武士阿喀琉斯屈服于阿伽门农的故事了。问题在于，威望是否已经排挤掉强壮，成为通往权力的唯一道路。或者说，旧的强者为王的体制是否依然存在。

上过中学的人或许都赞同，“名誉侵犯”——也就是恶意的嚼舌头，甚至语言暴力——似乎在十来岁孩子寻求身份认可的过程中扮演了重要的角色。利用北卡罗来纳州高中的数据，法里斯发现了一种模式。与传统上认为地位较高的孩子总会欺负地位较低的孩子有所不同，大部分矛盾总是在内部的，也就是孩子们一般会把与自己身份等级相当的孩子当作攻击对象。地位越高，攻击行为越频繁，直到最顶端的级别，几乎完全没有攻击行为了。为什么？法里斯的想法是，已经上升到顶端的孩子对此不需要再做理会了。实际上，那些挤兑普通运动员的明星运动员给人以不安全、对自己没信心的感觉。法里斯想到：“在某种程度上，盼望这些人表现出友好的态度算是一种奢侈，因为他们的地位没有受到威胁。”

加利福尼亚大学伯克利分校心理学家卡梅隆•安德森认为，在成年人的等级阶层中，统治力已经不再扮演重要的角色。他说：“如果一个人试图仅仅通过制造恐惧来控制一个群体，那么顺从他将会付出巨大的代价。”他认为，我们把某个人推举到领导的位置是基于他的能力，而不再是恐惧。但即使他说得有道理，刚愎自用、支配别人的行为依然有机会施展间接的优势。安德森自己用一种戏剧性的方式表明了这一点。

能力的问题是，我们往往难以通过第一眼就做出判断。当然在某些职业上，能力水平还是相当透明的。例如，一个职业棒球运动员，在上个赛季打出6个本垒打，很难装作他打出了60个本垒打。但是在商业领域，这一点颇为晦涩。你帮助成功推出的这个产品究竟是因为你个人的贡献，还是因为你强有力的二把手？幸运的市场投放时机？竞争对手的错误？前任打下的基础？还是因为你是恰好被安排到这个位置上的螺丝钉（就像吉姆•柯林斯所说）？我们不得而知。于是我们只好依赖其它的迹象——也就是我们将其错误地当作真正原因的表面能力迹象。

令人震惊的是这样的迹象究竟有多么强大。安德森把一些大学生两两配对，请他们在一张空白的北美地图上放置15个城市的具体位置。一个人对她地理知识的自信程度既体现出她实际的地理知识水平，也影响到她的伙伴根据实际表现对她的评判，而且两者程度相当。换句话说，表现出对地理知识很了解，和真正对地理知识很了解是同样重要的。在另一个实验中，4个人的小组合作解决数学问题。对自己解题能力表现得最有信心的人，往往会成为这个小组的领头人。只要第一个说出答案，不管对错，都会被人认为水平比较高。

研究人员的大忌——混淆因果关系，就是过分自信的人得以生存的机会。但过分自信往往不是刻意装出来的样子。安德森说：“相关的迹象表明，当属于30％落后群体的人说他们其实属于95％领先群体的时候，他们的确是这样认为的。”

由于过分自信者经常会出现一些明显的失败（比如拉姆斯菲尔德、唐纳德），所以安德森开始了一项新的研究课题。他招募了一些对自我有非常准确认知的实验对象，要求他们在对某个问题不确定时表现出自信的样子，同时观察他们所取得的成就是否与真的认为自己了不起的人一样。安德森说：“表演者的确说服了自己，”但程度远远比不上那些在内心深处把自己的状态与真实水平完全脱钩的人。“也就是说，彻底的自我欺骗让你走得更远。”

但我还是有疑问，如果给那些实验对象足够的时间，他们是否会更充分地融入所扮演的角色呢？安德森指出，实验参与者的自我欺骗心理或许来源于他们早期的行为，“或许他们先是假装，之后是自己确信，最后果真变成了那样。”亚里士多德说，重复的事情造就了我们。

实际上，我们可以清楚地看到，缺少自知之明，或者刻意去假装能力强大，以及其它各种自以为是的行为所带来的早期优势，往往会成为长期、固定的优势。文学作品告诉我们，一旦出现等级制度，人们就喜欢在事后分析为什么那些掌权的人会走上他们的位置。与此相同，体验过权力滋味的人通常会展示出带有权力意味的行为（比如激进的身体语言、不放过任何占便宜的机会）。不仅如此，这种倾向让他们有机会来提出会议议程、主导讨论方向、结成盟友关系，也就是真正地建立起领导力，让他们的地位合法化。这也就是为什么在大学里，第一堂课积极发言非常重要。

当然，如果把安德森的结论稍做改变，主动性或许也是个人能力的一部分，参与测试的人员本来就是在理性的基础上选出领导人。但高谈阔论和领导者是一回事吗？

就让我们深入来讨论一下。



哈佛大学商学院退休教授乔治•卡波特•洛基曾经谈到战前的年代，他记得自己在10岁的时候玩过一种叫擒抱式橄榄球的运动。有一个男人站在场边大喊大叫，那个人穿着靴子和马裤，显然刚骑过马，他不断用超高的音量提醒场上的儿子“给我去抢！”

那是1937年，美国国内一片和平。但乔治•S•巴顿显然不平静。在波士顿上流生活区北海滨日校运动场的母亲观众中（洛基记得，观众都是母亲），这个骑马男是如此的醒目，让洛基都为他场上的儿子感到有些尴尬（他的儿子名字也是乔治）。洛基的父亲刚刚被选为参议员，他在场上的位置是后卫。

洛基再一次见到巴顿是在1942年。洛基一家和巴顿一家到贝宁堡野餐。在回来的路上，参议员洛基驾驶巴顿的军用吉普车，巴顿开着洛基的普通汽车，洛基夫人坐在前排，小洛基坐在后排。他回忆到：“我们沿着一条笔直的路行驶，时速超过了70英里。突然之间，巴顿掏出他的象牙柄左轮手枪，向天空开枪，我猜想是为了让这趟旅途更有生气。”这时一个军警把我们的车叫停，就像电影里的场景一样，巴顿用标志性的语气说：“你难道不知道我是谁吗？”之后，巴顿“拍了拍尴尬的军警的肩膀，说：‘没事，年轻人，你只是在履行职责。’”然后他继续开车上路，留下一串手枪声。

巴顿的机械化部队历史性地穿越欧洲大陆几十年后，二战老兵、社会历史学家保罗弗塞尔在接受记者采访时说，他想要写一本有关将军的书，内容就是“将领的成功与社会生活中的变态霸道有关吗？”

这本书从来没有面世，但是巴顿成为了一个在诸多场合可供研究的宝贵对象。首先，洛基的故事强调了场合的重要性。在一种场合（战时的欧洲）可以让你如鱼得水的特性或许在另外一个场合（和平时期的马萨诸塞州）让你举步维艰，这说明巴顿缺少适应性。

但其次，巴顿引申出一个有关混蛋在组织中的价值问题。对自己的士兵胡作非为让巴顿遭到了训斥和排挤（1943年，他抽了两名在战场上疲惫不堪等待撤离的士兵的耳光），但是他对敌人和强硬态度又让他在5个月之后复职了。

当我在思考我的朋友中是否有符合艾伦•詹姆斯对浑球的定义时，我想到了两个人。我恐怕不能准确说出为什么和他们在一起，或许仅仅是因为自己的生活圈子越来越大，不知怎么周围就出现了这样一些人。之后我又想到了滑水。

我和几位朋友租了一条汽艇。在轰鸣的马达声中，有人说太可惜了我们没有滑水板，那肯定好玩。

几分钟之后，一位叫乔丹的朋友把船停靠在一个码头上，问一个八、九岁的男孩，你有滑水板吗？

男孩似乎对这个问题有些不知所措，他说没有。或许他们家的储藏室里有，但只有他的爸妈才会知道。那么，你愿意不愿意跑回家问问他们？男孩看起来很不情愿，但他还是这么做了。

我们几个人在船上分享男孩的感受，或许他实在不愿意拒绝这样彬彬有礼的要求，或许也是出于同样的想法：毕竟没有人说要停止这个交易。但问题在于，与乔丹这样的人在一起，你可以轻松得到本来不属于你的东西——热门餐厅的靠窗座位、网球赛的场边席位，而且还不用扮演坏人。罪过是乔丹的，实惠是大家的。

那位哲学家詹姆斯跟我提到过一个混蛋，他为了让周围的朋友们接受自己，偶尔会做出一些表面上的道歉。但是如果遇到与其它部门争夺有限的资源，他可以挺身而出，给出极有说服力的理由，让所有人都相信他的部门最应该得到这些资源。

把索取者在集体福利问题上的行为效果剥离出来，这正是荷兰社会心理学家范•克里夫和他的研究团队在2012年所从事的一项有关咖啡壶的研究所揭露的问题。

表面上看起来，研究方式似乎很简单。两个人被告知要完成一个任务，其中一个人——在所有的测试中都使用男性测试者——从一位研究人员桌子上的咖啡壶中偷咖啡。这种行为对于其它人把他推举到领导岗位上的意愿是否有任何影响？

答案是取决于不同的情况。如果他仅仅为自己偷来一杯咖啡，公众对于他掌权的期望有小幅下降。如果，他把咖啡壶偷过来，为自己和其他人都倒上咖啡，那么他的掌权期望就会大幅上涨。人们想让这样的人做领导。

亚当•格兰特说：“如果这个人为集体谋得了福利，而并没有偷咖啡，结果会怎样？我想比较一下两者的区别。”

实际上，范•克里夫的研究就是在做这样的比较。当一个人把自己的咖啡和其他人分享时，他在众人心目中的形象一落千丈。在别人眼中，这个版本的他变成了一个不适合当领导的人。

当我把这个结果告诉格兰特之后，他沉默了一会，说：“我想了解多次重复这个实验的结果。”他强调，时间很重要，有迹象显示“给予者需要过一段时间才能彻底放弃给予就是示弱这种观点。在一次性的实验中，你无从了解这一点。”

在另一项有关购物行为的研究中，你可以看到这一点。你也可以看到，在这个问题上，贱人所获取的优势比较有限。



达伦•戴尔从未光顾过温哥华市区的爱马仕商店，一天下午，他在闲逛时进入了这家商店。他穿着牛仔裤和T恤衫——他自己说“看起来一塌糊涂”，他没有购买任何东西的打算。店员站在柜台后，把目光从手中的一张纸上移向他。戴尔说：“我几乎能看到她摇头叹气的样子。”

真是个混蛋，戴尔想。当他离开商店的时候，买了两瓶220美元的柚子古龙水。

戴尔说：“简直不敢相信我花了那么多钱。”他其实本应了解其中的原委，因为他是英属哥伦比亚大学市场和行为学教授。不久之前，他还筹划了一项研究，题目是“是他吗？”也就是：粗鲁可以让人们掏出钱包吗？。

回答是肯定的。对于那些“给人远大志向与抱负”的品牌，比如古驰、博柏利和路易威登，顾客愿意在一种受排挤的感觉下支付更多的钱。但品质和资格是其中的关键因素，客户必须要对该品牌有长久渴望的感觉。如果销售人员不考虑品牌试图彰显的形象就盲目采取居高临下的姿态，必然会收到相反的效果。对于那些大规模投放市场的零售品牌，比如GAP、美国之鹰、H&M，顾客受排挤的感觉就等于业绩灾难。

最后一点，这样的效果似乎仅限于偶然的一次性遭遇。戴尔和他的同事跟踪调查购买者后，发现了一种飞返效应，就和他自己在走出商店之后的感觉一样：顾客在购买之后，对于这个品牌的渴望度与开始相比有大幅度的下降。（说到这一点，戴尔说他后来再没有造访过爱马仕商店。）

奢侈品零售业仅仅是一个特例，但是这项研究还揭示出一个更广泛、更普遍的有关扮演混蛋的角色所获得的某种优势：一旦出现问题，混蛋们不会在乎所谓从前积累的那些良好声誉。

2003年初，霍维尔•雷尼斯的《纽约时报》运作一帆风顺。自从他在一年半之前晋升为执行总编之后，这份报纸获得了7次普利策奖。之后爆发了丑闻，一位记者杰森•布莱尔在报道中使用了虚构的材料。

雷尼斯召集了一个全体员工大会，目的是澄清有关丑闻的一些细节。当雷尼斯请员工提问他来回答时，场面变成了一边倒地谴责他的管理风格。都市板块副总编乔•塞科斯顿说：“员工感受更多的是威胁，不是领导。我相信，在内心深处，你们已经对新闻编辑室失去了信心。”

雷尼斯在会议一开始就做出了表态，他说：“你们把我当成一个不可接近、傲慢自大的人，甚至我听说，害怕的心理让编辑们不敢把坏消息告诉我。” 塞斯•穆金在他的书《重要新闻》中说，这是他试图让自己成为一个聆听者的表态。但是当听到塞科斯顿的抱怨之后，雷尼斯爆发了，他喊道：“别把我丑化成造反派！”

霍维尔•雷尼斯就是这样的人。尽管后来接受他辞呈的人是报纸的发行人亚瑟•苏斯贝格，但雷尼斯的确遭到了自己人的强烈反对。

总结一下：扮演混蛋的角色必然会导致失败。至少从长远角度来看，如果没有给组织带来额外的收益；如果你的职业经历必须要频繁地与人打交道；如果你失败（哪怕只有一次）；如果你缺少像史蒂夫•乔布斯那样的魅力光环（还有一些研究结果显示，如果你是女性，失败的几率更大）。也就是说，扮演混蛋的角色会让大部分人在大部分的场合中失败。

但是至少在三种情况下，给自己添加一些混蛋的色彩或许会有帮助。第一，如果你的工作，或者工作中的某些部分，有一次性遭遇的机会，并且声誉遭到损坏所带来的影响微乎其微。第二，一个组织刚刚组建之后的某个转瞬即逝的时机，但等级制度被长期延续下来（想想夏令营的第一天）。第三，这里没有详细讨论，但需要提出：当组织处于生死存亡之际，对速度的需求高于一切，人们对于继续存在的愿望极其迫切。当苹果陷入绝境，市场占有率只有4％时，董事会把史蒂夫•乔布斯请回公司。（乔布斯接下来就把邀请他回来的那些人赶出公司。）

到这里，我们或许应该撕下贴在自己身上那么久的标签了。好人不会永远和颜悦色，坏蛋也不是永远无恶不作。我们有能力改变自己，难道不是吗？


乔治•S•巴顿

在为这篇文章做调查的过程中，我也设计了自己的现场实验。我计划走进三家奢侈品商店——蒂芙尼、劳力士和特斯拉，装成美国文学中最屌的人物形象汤姆•布坎南（译者注：《了不起的盖茨比》中的人物）的样子，看看店员们会有什么表现。也就是说，我会摒弃一切令人愉悦的社交礼节，没有“请”、“谢谢”、“你好”和打招呼致意等繁文缛节，一句话最多只有三个字。

方法上的局限性（也就是说我无法在扮演过坏人之后再扮演好人走进同一家商店）让我的调查结果并不可靠，但我的确有一个发现：违背自己的本性太难了。我勉强可以让一句话不超过三个字，尽管这令我非常不舒服，而且必须容忍一些野蛮的语言。（“这个”、“这个不好”、“为什么是劳力士”。）但是不能说必要的问候语的条件太过分了。说“你好”和“谢谢”的愉悦感是如此的根深蒂固，以至于我不得不咽下已经到嘴边的话。我有一种感觉，我给对方留下的印象不像是“混蛋”，更像是“遭人怜悯的古怪佬”。

亚当•格兰特说：“这就是我在写作《给予和索取》时颇为纠结的问题，我觉得这很难改变。”大部分人会根据不同的环境改变自己的处事方式，“大部分人在面对家人和朋友时，都是给予者，”但是在工作中就换了一副嘴脸。“我觉得，让人们改变自己的行为方式并不是教给他们一种崭新的方法，而是让他们意识到，哦，你在这种场合所使用的行为方式也可以在其它场合使用。”

日常的练习也会有所帮助，或许最好的例子是我的老朋友吉姆•韦斯特曼。韦斯特曼离开他商场的职业，应征加入海军陆战队，在侦察连服役，亲眼见证过伊拉克战争。现在，他在休斯顿经营一家科技公司。

韦斯特曼告诉我，在加入海军陆战队之前，他奉行的是中间道路经商原则，永远不温不火。加入海军陆战队之后，立即进入到一个这样的环境：突然之间被要求用一根大棍子与队友搏斗，声嘶力竭地大喊，然后马上停止、坐下，把制服上的褶皱抻平。当他再回到商业环境中，韦斯特曼说他发生了改变。

在他的内心深处，他已经意识到自己可以“从15迈的速度迅速加速到90迈”，然后立即恢复到极为平静的“静止状态”。同时他也变得更加坚强。他告诉我，最近他和一位律师谈话，对方不赞同他申请的商标方案。韦斯特曼打断了律师的话，使用的措辞是“住嘴”。然后用咄咄逼人的语气说他认为这个商标会给竞争对手带来威胁感，尽管他也理解律师认为这里面存在着风险。然后，韦斯特曼把语气放缓和，为他提高的音量道歉。

“我喜欢！”那位律师说。韦斯特曼记得他说，希望他更多的客户都那么有激情、那么直接。“我认为，你可以强硬，只要不招人讨厌。”在与他的另一次谈话中，一个词语的区别让我记忆犹新。当我用aggression这个词描述他时，他说他更喜欢aggressiveness这个词。

这有什么区别？

Aggression既是一种行为，也是一种感觉。Aggressiveness仅仅是一种行为，可以开启，也可以关闭。前者是一种宣泄，后者仅仅是一种工具。

这又把我们带回了史蒂夫•乔布斯。

是的，他造福了很多人，也伤害了很多人。但几乎所有人都同意的一点是，乔布斯是个门外汉。正如斯坦福大学的罗伯特•萨顿所说：“如果我们把成功领导者的习惯都复制过来，那肯定就像是喝了野味火鸡威士忌一样，就像是西南航空公司的创始人之一赫伯•凯莱赫。”

那么对于那些依然摸不到头脑的人来说，你们的通行证是这样的：你不需要变得和史蒂夫一样。《60分钟采访》节目在采访《乔布斯传》的作者艾萨克森时，问他乔布斯的失败之处在哪里，他说：“他应该更和善一些。”格兰特说：“我们怎么知道他的成功来源于他那些蛮不讲理的行为……而不是其它的原因？”实际上，由布伦特•施兰德和里克•特兹利主笔的最新版乔布斯传记作品认为，乔布斯在他离开苹果的期间变得更成熟了，懂得如何调整自己的行为。在他事业的第二阶段（也是更加成功的阶段），他会在必要时奖励员工，有出色成绩时给予表扬，当然还是会让别人见识到他的厉害。

没有经历过这样的改变，也就是没有强迫自己走出舒适的区域，至少在某种程度上，我们或许永远无法达成我们的目标，无论我们对自己目前所的状态是满意还是不满意。正如格兰特所说：“我现在越来越相信，善良的人的确总是被落在后面。”

他相信，最有效的人是那些“不友善的给予者”，也就是用令人讨厌的方式来帮助别人获得进步和成功的人。他指出，一些被我们认为最“没有人性的”公司文化其实并不推崇混蛋，而是充满了不友善的给予者。拿通用电气举例，其名声远扬的“评级与封杀”制度每年会淘汰业绩垫底的10％员工。格兰特说：“从表面上看来，GE或许是索取者横行无忌的天下，但实际情况比较复杂。那里的人的确很强硬，他们会挑战你，迫使你成长和发展，他们给你设定的目标比你给自己设定的目标更高。但是他们是为了你好，确保你和公司可以得到最大化的利益。我认为，最难解释清楚的一个问题是，做一个给予者并不是必须要做一个善良的人。”当我回想自己在以前访问过的那些最令人激动的商界人士时，格兰特的话切中肯綮，我立即想到了英特尔的安迪•葛洛夫。我知道，如果向葛洛夫提一个愚蠢的问题，他会告诉你这个问题不好。他一手构建了英特尔被称为“建设性对抗”的企业文化，你可以挑战思想，但不能挑战提出思想的人。不可以针对个人，因为他仅仅是想让别人知道他的想法。结果就是你要做更详尽的准备工作。

这里必须要明确一个区别：混蛋、自恋者和索取者的行为仅仅是为了满足他们的自我，而不是让组织受益。不友善的给予者也是同样的强硬，但他们的目的是为了达成共同的目标。

所以，我们终于知道该怎么做了。

对顾客保持微笑；主动做事；变通应对某些规则；为你的同事偷些饼干；随时都知道自己究竟在做什么；沉默时让别人先开口；习惯应对困难；别把自己的感觉太当回事；了解你究竟在保护什么；既强硬又友善；挑战思想，不要挑战提出思想的人；别成为目前行为模式的奴隶。而且，最重要的是，别给人贴上恶毒的标签。那才是混蛋的行为。





原文：

Smile at the customer. Bake cookies for your colleagues. Sing your subordinates’ praises. Share credit. Listen. Empathize. Don’t drive the last dollar out of a deal. Leave the last doughnut for someone else.

Sneer at the customer. Keep your colleagues on edge. Claim credit. Speak first. Put your feet on the table. Withhold approval. Instill fear. Interrupt. Ask for more. And by all means, take that last doughnut. You deserve it.

Follow one of those paths, the success literature tells us, and you’ll go far. Follow the other, and you’ll die powerless and broke. The only question is, which is which?

Of all the issues that preoccupy the modern mind—Nature or nurture? Is there life in outer space? Why can’t America field a decent soccer team?—it’s hard to think of one that has attracted so much water-cooler philosophizing yet so little scientific inquiry. Does it pay to be nice? Or is there an advantage to being a jerk?

We have some well-worn aphorisms to steer us one way or the other, courtesy of Machiavelli (“It is far better to be feared than loved”), Dale Carnegie (“Begin with praise and honest appreciation”), and Leo Durocher (who may or may not have actually said “Nice guys finish last”). More recently, books like The Power of Nice and The Upside of Your Dark Side have continued in the same vein: long on certainty, short on proof.

So it was a breath of fresh air when, in 2013, there appeared a book that brought data into the debate. The author, Adam Grant, is a 33-year-old Wharton professor, and his best-selling book, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success, offers evidence that “givers”—people who share their time, contacts, or know-how without expectation of payback—dominate the top of their fields. “This pattern holds up across the board,” Grant wrote—from engineers in California to salespeople in North Carolina to medical students in Belgium. Salted with anecdotes of selfless acts that, following a Horatio Alger plot, just happen to have been repaid with personal advancement, the book appears to have swung the tide of business opinion toward the happier, nice-guys-finish-first scenario.

And yet suspicions to the contrary remain—fueled, in part, by another book: Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson. The average business reader, worried Tom McNichol in an online article for The Atlantic soon after the book’s publication, might come away thinking: “See! Steve Jobs was an asshole and he was one of the most successful businessmen on the planet. Maybe if I become an even bigger asshole I’ll be successful like Steve.”

McNichol is not alone. Since Steve Jobs was published in 2011, “I think I’ve had 10 conversations where CEOs have looked at me and said, ‘Don’t you think I should be more of an asshole?’ ” says Robert Sutton, a professor of management at Stanford, whose book, The No Asshole Rule, nonetheless includes a chapter titled “The Virtues of Assholes.”

Lacking an Adam Grant to weave them together, the data that support a counter-case remain disconnected. But they do exist.

At the University of Amsterdam, researchers have found that semi-obnoxious behavior not only can make a person seem more powerful, but can make them more powerful, period. The same goes for overconfidence. Act like you’re the smartest person in the room, a series of striking studies demonstrates, and you’ll up your chances of running the show. People will even pay to be treated shabbily: snobbish, condescending salespeople at luxury retailers extract more money from shoppers than their more agreeable counterparts do. And “agreeableness,” other research shows, is a trait that tends to make you poorer. “We believe we want people who are modest, authentic, and all the things we rate positively” to be our leaders, says Jeffrey Pfeffer, a business professor at Stanford. “But we find it’s all the things we rate negatively”—like immodesty—“that are the best predictors of higher salaries or getting chosen for a leadership position.”

Pfeffer is concerned for his M.B.A. students: “Most of my students have a problem because they’re way too nice.”

He tells a story about a former student who visited his office. The young man had been kicked out of his start-up by—Pfeffer speaks the words incredulously—the Stanford alumni mentor he himself had invited into his company. Had there been warning signs?, Pfeffer asked. Yes, said the student. He hadn’t heeded them, because he’d figured the mentor was too big of a deal in Silicon Valley to bother meddling in his little affairs.

“What happens if you put a python and a chicken in a cage together?,” Pfeffer asked him. The former student looked lost. “Does the python ask what kind of chicken it is? No. The python eats the chicken. And that’s what she”—the alumni mentor—“does. She eats people like you for breakfast.”

In Grant’s framework, the mentor in this story would be classified as a “taker,” which brings us to a major complexity in his findings. Givers dominate not only the top of the success ladder but the bottom, too, precisely because they risk exploitation by takers. It’s a nuance that’s often lost in the book’s popular rendering. “I’ve become the nice-guys-finish-first guy,” he told me.

Give and Take seeks to pinpoint what, exactly, separates successful givers from “doormat” givers (the subtleties of which we will return to). But it does not consider what separates successful jerks, like Steve Jobs, from failed ones like … well, Steve Jobs, who was pushed out of his start-up by the mentor he’d recruited, in 1985.

The fact is, me-first behavior is highly adaptive in certain professional situations, just like selflessness is in others. The question is, why—and, for those inclined to the instrumental, how can you distinguish between the two?

Steve Jobs (Paul Sakuma/AP/DAPD)

In the summer of 2008, a popular surfing spot in California was frequented by a surfer named Lance, to whom we should be grateful. Lance thought every wave was his, so when a fellow surfer, Aaron James, grabbed a wave well within the bounds of surfing etiquette, James was subjected, like many before and after him, to a profanity-laced diatribe.

What an asshole, James thought as he picked up his board.

Philosophers since Aristotle have been obsessed with categories, and James—who got a doctorate in philosophy at Harvard and teaches at the University of California at Irvine—is no exception. What did I mean, exactly, by asshole? he wondered.

James honed a definition that he finally published in his 2012 book, Assholes: A Theory. Formally stated, “The asshole (1) allows himself to enjoy special advantages and does so systematically; (2) does this out of an entrenched sense of entitlement; and (3) is immunized by his sense of entitlement against the complaints of other people.”

What separates the asshole from the psychopath is that he engages in moral reasoning (he understands that people have rights; his entitlement simply leads him to believe his rights should take precedence). That this reasoning is systematically, and not just occasionally, flawed is what separates him from merely being an ass. (Linguistics backs up the distinction: ass comes from the Latin assinus, for “donkey,” while the hole is in the arras, the Hittite word for “buttocks.”)

James wasn’t focused on whether assholes get ahead or not. But I ran his definition past a management professor who is: Donald Hambrick, of Penn State. He told me it sounded “almost identical” to academic psychology’s definition of narcissism—a trait Hambrick measured in CEOs and then plotted against the performance of their companies, in a 2007 study with Arijit Chatterjee.

Measuring narcissism was tricky, Hambrick said. Self-reporting was not exactly an option, so he chose a set of indirect measures: the prominence of each CEO’s picture in the company’s annual report; the size of the CEO’s paycheck compared with that of the next-highest-paid person in the company; the frequency with which the CEO’s name appeared in company press releases. Lastly, he looked at the CEO’s use of pronouns in press interviews, comparing the frequency of the first-person plural with that of the first-person singular. Then he rolled all the results into a single narcissism indicator.

How did the narcissists fare? Hambrick had been “hoping against hope,” he confessed, to find that they tended to lead their companies down the toilet. “Because that’s what we all hope—that there’s this day of reckoning, a comeuppance.” Instead, he found that the narcissists were like Grant’s givers: they clustered near both extremes of the success spectrum.

This U-shaped distribution, Hambrick grudgingly allows, suggests that “there is such a thing as a useful narcissist.” Narcissistic CEOs, he found, tend to be gamblers. Compared with average CEOs, they are more likely to make high-profile acquisitions (in an effort to feed the narcissistic need for a steady stream of adulation). Some of these splashy moves work out. Others don’t. But “to the extent that innovation and risk taking are in short supply in the corporate world”—an assertion few would contest—“narcissists are the ones who are going to step up to the plate.”

Of course, that says nothing about how narcissists (or takers, or jerks) get to the executive suite in the first place. Grant argues that many takers are good at hiding their unpleasant side from potential benefactors—at “kissing up and kicking down,” as the saying goes—which is undoubtedly part of the story: a number of studies indicate that takers show one face to superiors, whence promotions flow, and another to peers and underlings. But that isn’t the entire story. It turns out that undisguised heelish behavior can often help you get ahead.

Consider the following two scenes. In the first, a man takes a seat at an outdoor café in Amsterdam, carefully examines the menu before returning it to its holder, and lights a cigarette. When the waiter arrives to take his order, he looks up and nods hello. “May I have a vegetarian sandwich and a sweet coffee, please?” he asks. “Thank you.”

In the second, the same man takes the same seat at the same outdoor café in Amsterdam. He puts his feet up on an adjoining seat, taps his cigarette ashes onto the ground, and doesn’t bother putting the menu back into its holder. “Uh, bring me a vegetarian sandwich and a sweet coffee,” he grunts, staring past the waiter into space. He crushes the cigarette under his shoe.

Dutch researchers staged and filmed each scene as part of a 2011 study designed to examine “norm violations.” Research stretching back to at least 1972 had shown that power corrupts, or at least disinhibits. High-powered people are more likely to take an extra cookie from a common plate, chew with their mouths open, spread crumbs, stereotype, patronize, interrupt, ignore the feelings of others, invade their personal space, and claim credit for their contributions. “But we also thought it could be the other way around,” Gerben van Kleef, the study’s lead author, told me. He wanted to know whether breaking rules could help people ascend to power in the first place.

Yes, he found. The norm-violating version of the man in the video was, in the eyes of viewers, more likely to wield power than his politer self. And in a series of follow-up studies involving different pairs of videos, participants, responding to prompts, made statements such as “I would like this person as my boss” and “I would give this person a promotion.” The conditions had to be right (more on this later), but when they were, rule breakers were more likely to be put in charge.

“There’s surprisingly little work on this, if you ask me,” van Kleef told me. But the new field of evolutionary leadership has shed some light on the matter. Instead of asking why some people bully or violate norms, researchers are asking: Why doesn’t everyone?

There was a time in mankind’s history—well, prehistory—when being a bully was the only route to the top. We know this, explains Jon Maner, an evolutionary psychologist at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, by deduction. Every last species of animal except Homo sapiens determines pecking order according to physical strength and physical strength alone. This is true of the seemingly congenial dolphin, whose tooth-and-fin battles for status resemble Hobbes’s “war of everyone against everyone.” And it is true even of our closest cousin, the chimpanzee.

“For animals, a victory or a defeat is not complicated to interpret,” says Robert Faris, a sociologist at UC Davis. If you were to screen the movie Cool Hand Luke for an audience of chimps—something he has not done—they would have no trouble determining who prevails in the prison boxing scene: the hulking boss, Dragline, beats Luke until the title character can barely stand. But the next scene would leave the chimps scratching their heads. Luke, the loser, has become the new leader of the prisoners.

A human moviegoer could attempt to explain. Because Luke kept getting up out of the dirt, even when he was beat, he won the other prisoners’ respect. But the chimps would just not get it. “That’s a complexity of humans,” Faris says: it was not until after the human-chimpanzee split that Homo sapiens developed a newer, uniquely human path to power. Scholars call it “prestige.”

Prestige emerged when our ancestors gained the ability to exchange know-how. An undersized ape-man who knew a better way of finding berries or building a fire or trapping a gazelle could now, instead of being forced to accept beta status, attract a clientele who would trade deference for access to his expertise. Unlike dominance, which is mediated by fear, prestige is freely conferred. But once conferred, of course, it decisively changes the dynamic of power: five ordinary ape-men can, in conjunction, overcome even the strongest single antagonist. The question of “who’s in command?” was now complexified by the question of “who’s in demand?”

Whether this new, competence-based path to power emerged is not debated by scholars. If it hadn’t, The Iliad wouldn’t have opened with Achilles, the greatest warrior in all of Greece, working for Agamemnon. The question is whether prestige supplanted dominance as the only path to power—or whether the older system also remains operational.

Anyone who’s been through middle school might agree that “reputational aggression”—a k a vicious gossip, or even verbal abuse—seems to play a role in the status struggles of teenagers. Using data from North Carolina high schools, Faris uncovered a pattern showing that, contrary to the stereotype of high-status kids victimizing low-status ones, most aggression is local: kids tend to target kids close to them on the social ladder. And the higher one rises on that ladder, the more frequent the acts of aggression—until, near the very top, aggression ceases almost completely. Why? Kids with nowhere left to climb, Faris posits, have no more use for it. Indeed, the star athlete who demeaned the mild mathlete might come off as insecure. “In some ways,” Faris muses, “these people have the luxury of being kind. Their social positions are not in jeopardy.”

Cameron Anderson, a research psychologist at UC Berkeley, believes that among adults, dominance plays little role anymore in the rise of leaders. “If a person is trying to take charge of the group simply by inducing fear,” he figures, “there’s too much to lose by deferring to him.” He’s convinced that we elevate the people we think are more competent, not more scary. But even if he’s right, there’s still room for an indirect advantage to domineering behavior—one that Anderson himself has illuminated in dramatic fashion.

The problem with competence is that we can’t judge it by looking at someone. Yes, in some occupations it’s fairly transparent—a professional baseball player, for instance, cannot very well pretend to have hit 60 home runs last season when he actually hit six—but in business it’s generally opaque. Did the product you helped launch succeed because of you, or because of your brilliant No. 2, or your lucky market timing, or your competitor’s errors, or the foundation your predecessor laid, or because you were (as the management writer Jim Collins puts it) a socket wrench that happened to fit that one job? Difficult to know, really. So we rely on proxies—superficial cues for competence that we take and mistake for the real thing.

What’s shocking is how powerful these cues can be. When Anderson paired up college students and asked them to place 15 U.S. cities on a blank map of North America, the level of a person’s confidence in her geographic knowledge was as good a predictor of how highly her partner rated her, after the fact, as was her actual geographic knowledge. Let me repeat that: seeming like you knew about geography was as good as knowing about geography. In another scenario—four-person teams collaboratively solving math problems—the person with the most inflated sense of her own abilities tended to emerge as the group’s de facto leader. Being the first to blurt out an answer, right or wrong, was taken as a sign of superior quantitative skill.

Confusing cause and correlation—the lab researcher’s bugaboo—is what the confidence man (or woman) relies on. Overconfidence is usually not a put-on, however. “By all indications, when these people say they believe they’re in the 95th percentile when they’re actually in the 30th percentile, they fully believe it,” Anderson says.

Because overconfidence comes with some well-documented downsides (see: Rumsfeld, Donald), Anderson has lately been recruiting subjects with accurate self-impressions and instructing them to act confidently when they are uncertain, and seeing whether they fare as well as the true believers. “The actors are pretty darn convincing,” Anderson reports—but not as convincing as people whose mind-sets are genuinely untethered from their skill-sets. “It’s just that being fully self-deceived gets you further,” he says.

I did wonder, though: Could the apprentice actors, given enough time, come to inhabit their roles more fully? Anderson noted that self-delusion among his study’s participants could have been the product of earlier behaviors. “Maybe they faked it until they made it and that became them.” We are what we repeatedly do, as Aristotle observed.

In fact, it’s easy to see how an initial advantage derived from a lack of self-awareness, or from a deliberate attempt to fake competence, or from a variety of other, similar heelish behaviors could become permanent. Once a hierarchy emerges, the literature shows, people tend to construct after-the-fact rationalizations about why those in charge should be in charge. Likewise, the experience of power leads people to exhibit yet more power-signaling behaviors (displaying aggressive body language, taking extra cookies from the common plate). And not least, it gives them a chance to practice their hand at advocating an agenda, directing a discussion, and recruiting allies—building genuine leadership skills that help legitimize and perpetuate their status. This is why, in college, it’s good to speak up on the first day of class.

It is possible, of course, to reframe Anderson’s conclusions so that, for instance, initiative is itself a competence, in which case groups would be selecting their leaders more rationally than he supposes. But is a loudmouth the same thing as a leader?

Actually, let’s think about that.

When George Cabot Lodge, a professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, talks of the prewar years, he remembers a specific game of tackle football he played as a 10-year-old, and the man screaming and swearing on the sidelines. The man was wearing boots and breeches, apparently just off a horse, and was exhorting his son with four-letter words to “get in there and fight!”

It was 1937. America was at peace. George S. Patton was not. So conspicuous was the cavalryman among the mothers (and it was only mothers, Lodge recalls) at the Shore Country Day School on Boston’s genteel North Shore that Lodge remembers feeling bad for Patton’s son (also named George), who was playing tackle. Lodge, whose father had just been elected to the Senate, was playing guard.

The next time Lodge saw Patton was 1942. The Lodges and the Pattons went for a picnic at Fort Benning. On the way home, Senator Lodge took Patton’s military vehicle and Patton drove the Lodges’ civilian car, with Mrs. Lodge up front and Lodge the younger in back. “We were racing along this straight road, going about 70, when all of a sudden Patton takes his ivory-handled revolver out of his holster and starts shooting in the air,” Lodge recollects. “I guess to liven up the trip for me.” A military policeman pulled him over, as if on script, to receive the obligatory “Don’t you know who the hell I am?” Then, Lodge says, Patton “clapped the embarrassed MP on the shoulder and said, ‘That’s all right, young man. You’re just doing your job.’ And then he pulled onto the road and sped away, pistol blazing.”

Decades after Patton made his historic mechanized thrust across the plains of Europe, the World War II veteran and social historian Paul Fussell told a reporter that he wanted to write a book about the general. It was going to ask: “Is success in generalship related to the perversion of being a bully in social life?”

The book never came to pass. But Patton is a valuable case study on several counts. First, Lodge’s story underscores the importance of context: traits that serve you well in one context (wartime Europe) do not necessarily serve you well in another (peacetime Massachusetts), which would recommend a kind of adaptability that Patton lacked.

But second, Patton raises the question of the jerk’s value to the group. Bullying his own soldiers got Patton reprimanded and sidelined (in 1943, he’d slapped two privates suffering from battlefield fatigue and awaiting evacuation). His ability to bully the enemy is what restored him to favor five months later.

When I thought about whether I had friends or associates who fit Aaron James’s definition of an asshole, I could come up with two. I couldn’t pinpoint why I spent time with them, other than the fact that life seemed larger, grander—like the world was a little more at your feet—when they were around. Then I thought of the water skis.

Some friends had rented a powerboat. We had already taken it out on the water when someone remarked, above the engine noise, that it was too bad we didn’t have any water skis. That would have been fun.

Within a few minutes, an acquaintance I will call Jordan had the boat pulled up to a dock where a boy of maybe 8 or 9 was alone. Do you have any water skis?

The boy seemed unprepared for the question. Not really, he said. There might be some in storage, but only his parents would know. Well, would you be a champ and run back to the house and ask them? The boy did not look like he wanted to. But he did.

The rest of us in the boat shared the boy’s astonishment (Who asks that sort of question?), his reluctance to turn a nominally polite encounter into a disagreeable one, and perhaps the same paralysis: no one said anything to stop the exchange. But that’s the thing. Spend time with the Jordans of the world and you’re apt to get things you are not entitled to—the choice table at the overbooked restaurant, the courtside tickets you’d never ask for yourself—without ever having to be the bad guy. The transgression was Jordan’s. The spoils were the group’s.

James, the philosopher, told me of a jerk who managed to avoid being labeled one by his closest colleagues partly by offering the occasional pro forma apology. But also, when it came to vying for resources with other departments in his organization, he could stand and articulate the case more persuasively than anyone else that his group deserved those resources.

Isolating the effects of taker behavior on group welfare is exactly what van Kleef, the Dutch social psychologist, and fellow researchers set out to do in their coffee-pot study of 2012.

At first blush, the study seems simple. Two people are told a cover story about a task they’re going to perform. One of them—a male confederate used in each pair throughout the study—steals coffee from a pot on a researcher’s desk. What effect does his stealing have on the other person’s willingness to put him in charge?

The answer: It depends. If he simply steals one cup of coffee for himself, his power affordance shrinks slightly. If, on the other hand, he steals the pot and pours cups for himself and the other person, his power affordance spikes sharply. People want this man as their leader.

I related this to Adam Grant. “What about the person who gets resources for the group without stealing coffee?” he asked. “That’s a comparison I would like to see.”

It was a comparison, actually, that van Kleef had run. When the man did just that—poured coffee for the other person without stealing it—his ratings collapsed. Massively. He became less suited for leadership, in the eyes of others, than any other version of himself.

Grant paused a quarter of a beat after I told him that. “What I would love to see,” he said, “is the repeated version of that experiment.” Time frames, he stressed, were important. Evidence suggests that “it takes givers a while to shatter this perception that giving is a sign of weakness. In a one-shot experiment, you don’t get to see any of that.”

In another study, from the world of shopping, you do get to see it. And it’s where the advantage to being a heel begins to look a lot more limited.

Darren Dahl had never set foot in the Hermès store in downtown Vancouver when, one afternoon, he sauntered in. Clad in jeans and a T-shirt—looking “kind of ratty,” he confesses—he had not planned on a shopping excursion. The saleswoman behind the counter looked up from some paperwork and, as Dahl remembers it, “literally shook her head in disapproval.”

What a jerk, Dahl thought. He reacted by leaving the store—after buying $220 worth of grapefruit cologne. Two bottles of it.

“I couldn’t believe I had spent so much money,” says Dahl, who should have known better: he is a professor of marketing and behavioral science at the University of British Columbia. Before long, he had devised a study that asked, was it just him? Or could rudeness cause other people to open their wallets too?

The answer was a qualified yes. When it came to “aspirational” brands like Gucci, Burberry, and Louis Vuitton, participants were willing to pay more in a scenario in which they felt rejected. But the qualifications were major. A customer had to feel a longing for the brand, and if the salesperson did not look the image the brand was trying to project, condescension backfired. For mass-market retailers like the Gap, American Eagle, and H&M, rejection backfired regardless.

Finally, the effect seemed to be limited to a single encounter. When Dahl and his colleagues followed up with the buyers, he found evidence of a boomerang effect much like the one he had felt a few minutes after his purchase: the buyers were less favorably disposed toward the brand than they had been at the outset. (And come to think of it, Dahl says, he hasn’t been back to Hermès since.)

Luxury retail is a very specific realm. But the study also points toward a bigger and more general qualification of the advantage to being a jerk: should something go wrong, jerks don’t have a reserve of goodwill to fall back on.

In early 2003, there was nothing wrong with Howell Raines’s New York Times. The paper had won seven Pulitzer Prizes since his promotion to executive editor a year and a half earlier. Then a scandal broke. A Times reporter, Jayson Blair, had been fabricating material in his stories.

A town-hall meeting that was intended to clear the air around the scandal, during which Raines appeared before staff members to answer questions, turned into a popular uprising against his management style. “People feel less led than bullied,” said Joe Sexton, a deputy editor for the Metro section. “I believe at a deep level you guys have lost the confidence of many parts of the newsroom.”

Raines himself had acknowledged as much earlier in the meeting. “You view me as inaccessible and arrogant,” he said. “Fear is a problem to such an extent, I was told, that editors are scared to bring me bad news.” It was an attempt to show he was a listener, Seth Mnookin reported in his book Hard News. But after listening to Sexton’s comments, Raines blew up. “Don’t demagogue me!” he shouted.

And that was pretty much it for Howell Raines. Though it was the paper’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who accepted his resignation soon after, Raines had effectively been shot by his own troops.

To summarize: being a jerk is likely to fail you, at least in the long run, if it brings no spillover benefits to the group; if your professional transactions involve people you’ll have to deal with over and over again; if you stumble even once; and finally, if you lack the powerful charismatic aura of a Steve Jobs. (It’s also marginally more likely to fail you, several studies suggest, if you’re a woman.) Which is to say: being a jerk will fail most people most of the time.

Yet in at least three situations, a touch of jerkiness can be helpful. The first is if your job, or some element of it, involves a series of onetime encounters in which reputational blowback has minimal effect. The second is in that evanescent moment after a group has formed but its hierarchy has not. (Think the first day of summer camp.) The third—not fully explored here, but worth mentioning—is when the group’s survival is in question, speed is essential, and a paralyzing existential doubt is in the air. It was when things got truly desperate at Apple, its market share having shrunk to 4 percent, that the board invited Steve Jobs to return (Jobs then ousted most of those who had invited him back).

But here is where we should part company with the labels that have carried us this far. Nice guys aren’t always nice. Heels aren’t always heels. We have the capacity to change. Don’t we?

George S. Patton (U.S. Army Signal Corps)

At one point in my research for this article, I devised my own field experiment, in which I would walk into three luxury retailers—Tiffany, Rolex, and Tesla—to see whether I could instill deference in the salespeople by acting like Tom Buchanan, American literature’s most fully formed heel. This meant dispensing with all social pleasantries—no “please” or “thank you,” no “hello” or salutation of any sort—and speaking in sentences of three words or fewer.

Methodological flaws (notably, lack of a control: I could not send a nicer version of me back into the same stores) contaminated my investigation. But the study did yield one finding: it is very hard to play against type. I could handle the three-word limit, albeit with great discomfort and a series of barbaric utterances (“Show me this,” “This is unacceptable,” “Why Rolex?”). But the ban on pleasantries was too much. The reflex to say hello or thanks was so ingrained that I found I had to muffle the words as they leaked out under my breath. I have a feeling that the impression I left may have been less “jerk” and more “oddball to be soothed or pitied.”

“This was an issue I struggled with while writing” Give and Take, Adam Grant told me. “I think it is hard to change.” That said, Grant continued, most people switch between styles depending on context. “Most people are givers with friends and family” but tend to match their colleagues’ behavior at work. “I think that changing people’s style is less about teaching them an entirely new mode of operating than getting them to realize, oh, this mode you use in one domain can be imported into another.”

Practice helps, too. Perhaps no one better exemplifies this than my old friend Jim Vesterman. Vesterman took a break from his business career to enlist in the Marine Corps, joining its ultra-elite Force Recon unit and seeing combat in Iraq. Now he runs a Houston-based tech company.

Prior to joining the Marines, Vesterman told me, he had a pretty middle-of-the-road business personality, never running too hot or too cold. Upon joining the Marines, he recalled, he entered an environment in which he might suddenly be told to start fighting a fellow cadet with a padded stick while yelling at the top of his lungs—and then, just as suddenly, to stop, sit down, and straighten out a tiny wrinkle in his uniform. When he reentered the business world, Vesterman said, he was different.

Armed with the knowledge that he could “go from 15 to 95 real quick” and then bring it back down just as fast, his “idling state” was extreme calm. But he also became more forceful. He described a recent conversation with a lawyer who was resisting his idea of applying for a trademark. Vesterman cut the lawyer off mid-sentence, with the word stop. In an aggressive tone, he explained that he wanted the trademark because it could have a chilling effect on competitors, even though he understood the lawyer’s point that it could be challenged. Vesterman then brought his tone down, and apologized for raising his voice.

“I love it!” the lawyer exclaimed. Vesterman recalled him saying that he wished more of his clients were as passionate and direct. “I think you can be tough, as long as you’re not toxic,” Vesterman told me. One other distinction sticks with me from an earlier conversation with him: when I used the word aggression, he said he preferred the word aggressiveness.

What is the difference?

Aggression is both a behavior and a feeling. Aggressiveness is just a behavior, and can be turned on or off. The first serves as an outlet. The second is simply a tool.

Which leads us back to Steve Jobs.

Yes, he brought great spoils to a great many groups. And yes, he hurt a lot of people while doing that. What most everyone can agree on, though, is that Jobs was an outlier. As Stanford’s Robert Sutton points out, “If we copied every habit of successful leaders, we’d all be drinking Wild Turkey, like Southwest Airlines’ co-founder Herb Kelleher.”

So to anyone out there still wondering, here’s your permission slip: you do not have to be like Steve. When Isaacson, his biographer, was asked by a 60 Minutes interviewer about Jobs’s failings, he replied, “He could have been kinder.” Grant adds, “How do we know he succeeded because of his asshole behaviors … and not in spite of them?” Indeed, a more recent biography of Jobs, by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, argues that Jobs matured during his time away from Apple, and was much more modulated in his behavior—giving credit when appropriate, dispensing praise when warranted, ripping someone a new one when necessary—during the second (and more successful) half of his career.

Without that kind of modulation—without getting a little outside our comfort zone, at least some of the time—we’re all probably less likely to reach our goals, whether we’re prickly or pleasant by disposition.

As Grant himself puts it, “What I’ve become convinced of is that nice guys and gals really do finish last.”

He believes that the most effective people are “disagreeable givers”—that is, people willing to use thorny behavior to further the well-being and success of others. He points out that some of the corporate cultures we consider most “cutthroat” likely are filled not with jerks but with disagreeable givers. Take General Electric, once famed for its “rank and yank” policy of jettisoning the bottom 10 percent of performers each year. “I thought that on face value, GE might be a place where you would expect takers to rise. But it seems more complicated than that,” Grant says. “The people are really tough there in the sense that they’re going to challenge you to grow and develop, they’re going to set higher goals for you than you would set for yourself. But they’re doing it to make you better and they’re doing it with your best interests and the company’s best interests in mind.” Grant adds: “The hardest thing that I struggle to explain to people is that being a giver is not the same as being nice.” When I thought back to some of the most compelling people I’ve interviewed in business, Grant’s words rang true. Intel’s Andy Grove immediately came to mind. Ask Grove a dumb question, I once learned, and he’ll tell you it’s not the right question. He’s the one who largely built Intel’s culture of what the company calls “constructive confrontation,” in which you challenge ideas, but not the people who expound them. It’s not personal. He just wants his point to be understood. The result is that you do your homework. You come prepared.

The distinction that needs to be made is this: Jerks, narcissists, and takers engage in behaviors to satisfy their own ego, not to benefit the group. Disagreeable givers aren’t getting off on being tough; they’re doing it to further a purpose.

So here’s what we know works.

Smile at the customer. Take the initiative. Tweak a few rules. Steal cookies for your colleagues. Don’t puncture the impression that you know what you’re doing. Let the other person fill the silence. Get comfortable with discomfort. Don’t privilege your own feelings. Ask who you’re really protecting. Be tough and humane. Challenge ideas, not the people who hold them. Don’t be a slave to type. And above all, don’t affix nasty, scatological labels to people.

It’s a jerk move.

Pentium_5

乔布斯终于可以安心长眠于三维空间以外的时空了，看看现在的年轻（包括较年轻）人天天除了低着头摆弄爱疯就无事可做的样子。