Sunday, January 20, 2013

My boss the psychopath

Pssst, my boss does not know about this post.

Science has finally caught up with the knowledge the downtrodden have held for centuries.

According to a recent study that made headline news, bosses, CEOs, have a higher rate of psychopaths among them than the general population.

What the news did not say is: we believe this to be true also for many, many other great leaders. Great is not a value judgement here, all it means is that history books and websites list them as great.

The team at the K-Landnews has discussed two obvious questions from these findings:

1) What can we do with the findings, is there any practical use?
2) How long before another study comes out and contradicts this one?

The answer to question 2 is we do not know.  We do know that we all have had moments when we finally accepted a scientific study as a launch point for change to some habit or other - only to open the papers the next day and find it squarely contradicted.

For fans of conspiracy theories, here is a starting point for another one: the list of the 10 professions with above average psychopath levels includes some with lots of money, some with a lot of influence, hence, how about "they are already busy deflecting the findings and discrediting the study". If you don't like this one, you'll have to find a conspiracy angle yourself, we don't do conspiracies very well at the K-Landnews, sorry.

The answer to question 1 includes "write a post about it". We are more than halfway through the post and still at a loss. Further suggestions in the newsroom included "instigate a campaign to get the South Park dream team to do an episode on this".

That one was shot down immediately: Come on, is there *any* episode of South Park without a psycho boss?

Another associate said: Write a human interest story about personal experiences with a psychopath boss.

That one was dunked with: Might just as well suggest a story about the Earth not being flat, nobody wants any more of that.

Slowly, reluctantly, TheEditor caved in and resumed its* search for more useless but fun puns in the daily avalanche of internet information.

* TheEditor insists on gender neutrality. Mainly to tick people off.

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