The recent issue of Wired magazine reports on (and some may say glorifies) the rude, authoritarian, my-way-or- the-highway leadership style of Steve Jobs in the article, How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong. So, just like that, after over a decade of management gurus coaching us on how to be coaches instead of bosses, and telling us how we should flatten our organizations and throw open wide the doors to the corner office, and after hour upon hour of Edward Demming videos warning us about the dangers of competition between and amongst our employees, and after finally just about convincing just about everyone to create a culture of nice in corporations throughout the globe, the Evil Manager rises once again and poof, it’s cool to be mean again.

If Steve Jobs is, in fact, an evil manager, then it goes without saying, it must be cool to be mean because no one epitomizes corporate cool more than the Mr. Jobs, himself.

Thank you Mr. Jobs!

Now, I’m not saying that it’s not important to be nice, or to cooperate and collaborate. It is. But what I am saying is that there is a place for mean and a place for conflict within the office.

Too much nice, too much cooperation, just might, after a period of time, make an organization soft and complacent. The organization may put so much emphasis on nice that it forsakes ingenuity–and profit–all in an effort to keep everyone happy.

Too much nice just might be deadly as well. Think: groupthink. Think: Challenger disaster. Think: Iraq intelligence failures.

So, in our effort to be nice, it would be nice to show a little mean every once in a while.

What do you think? Tell me about it.

FURTHER READING

A WikiBlog Consulting White Paper: IF NOTHING’S WRONG, THEN SOMETHING AIN’T RIGHT: An Interactionist Approach to Conflict

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