Who gets Humperdinck?

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We've worked for racists and bigots and homophobes. Antisemites and misogynists. Abusers, harassers, and several folks who managed to dodge #metoo, but only just. We've worked under toxic bosses who seemed to get off on the Machiavellian-style shit. And boards and investors who kept handing those people more power.

And while we've never worked for Elon. We've worked for a lot of guys who vibe a lot like Elon.

For all of our Very Bad Stories, amassed over a combined forty years in tech, we've heard many more. We train bosses for a living. And when you talk to bosses about how they show up in the role, many folks pull their past into the present. They talk about bosses they never want to be like. Their own Very Bad Stories, where just hearing them makes you wince.

Nearly all of the very bad stories about very bad bosses are punctuated with, "But I learned a lot."

We know this punctuation. We do it, too. There are past bosses we quote and have to add, "While this tool [or trick or strategy] is really effective, we learned it from someone really abusive."

If you've had a boss like this in the past, you may do the same thing. You attach meaning to the suffering. Yes, it was awful. But you came out stronger or smarter or more strategic or whatever. That second part doesn't negate the first part. But it, often grudgingly, provides a happier ending to a very bad story.

It would be easier if the bad bosses never taught us anything. Never shared advice from their own careers. Never gave us nuggets of wisdom that we still reference all the time. Unfortunately, that's not how this works.

No karma in capitalism

The bosses from these very bad stories are often very successful for a very long time. Over decades, the trajectories of their careers go up and to the right. They keep amassing power and money and influence. And that seems like a grand injustice. They are very bad people. Shouldn't very bad things befall them?

At the very least, bad bosses should be bad for business. And good bosses should be good for business. Otherwise, why put in all this work to manage our teams well? We just said it. You can be a shit-awful boss and, years later, have people point to things they learned from you that they still use.

Put another way...

Elon doesn't seem like a good boss but he's the richest dude on the planet. He must be doing something right. Right? If you can do all the good management things and still have the business fail. And do all the bad management things and still have the business succeed. Well, now what? If management best practices don't guarantee the best outcomes for the business, are those really best practices? And if you ignore all those best practices and can still be successful, how is that fair?

Where is the comeuppance?

There isn't one. Like, maybe there's a spiritual one waiting for them. Maybe they have a hollow life full of fair-weather friends. It's hard to say. But in practical, economic terms, they will be fine. As Aniyia says, disregarding the humanity of your workers rarely prevents a company from making a bunch of money.

And you know it if you think about it. Gates. Bezos. Thiel. Musk. What sign do any of us have that the ways they were abusive and awful lead to economic consequences?

Elon has spent months publicly berating the staff of an organization he was in talks to purchase and then lead. He's funding the purchase in large part with money he made selling off Tesla stock. Tesla, his company that re-opened during COVID against health orders, told workers they could stay home if they were concerned, and then fired them when they did. His company where line workers are forced to work until they pass out, and then their colleagues are told to just step around them. His company where Black workers came in every day to less pay than their white colleagues, more physically demanding assignments, and noose graffiti at their stations.

Nilay is right when he says owning Twitter is likely to be pretty hellish. But that's not what most of us mean by checks and balances.

You are also unchecked

Management is real power. Sometimes more, sometimes less. But often power over things like work assignments, promotions, salary, and termination. Power over workload, rest, and vacation. Power over core questions of whether your people can come to work somewhere safe and supportive, and go home at the end of the day with their dignity intact.

If you're a boss today, this means you. Even if you're buried several layers deep in the org chart. You've been given responsibility and authority over the work of other people. To do right by that power, you have to acknowledge it. Look around. Does your org have any precautions in place to stop you from abusing that power? If you're like most of the bosses we meet, you won't find many. Maybe you work in a shop with a strong union, or a jurisdiction with strong labour laws. But for many bosses, it's clear that the more you look and talk and vibe like Elon, the more permission you'll get to be capricious and abusive and cynical. To grind people down and burn people out. And then get handed some other job, or opportunity, or social media company. Where you can boast about your results, or at least your radical candor.

To not do that is a choice. You can choose to treat your colleagues with care and kindness. You can choose to build transparency and equity into the way your organization does business. If you've been reading our newsletter for any length of time at all you'll know that we're big fans of that choice. It even comes with economic rewards of its own. Your teams will be more creative, resourceful, collaborative, and trusting.

But the economic rewards aren't the reason to do it. It's a trap to accept such a one-dimensional frame. Once you start to use economic arguments to justify treating people with dignity, you open yourself up to people who want to use economic arguments to justify the opposite. And then we're all just in a haggle over how much dignity should cost.

Dignity is an end in itself. Equity is an end in itself. You are allowed, even under capitalism, to choose those things as non-negotiable. It's not true that the bad bosses in your life will get punished by the market, but it's also not true that they are inevitable. Every day that you worked for them, they had the opportunity to choose something better. And most days, they didn't. On those days, they failed you. And that's a failure, regardless of how wealthy it made them.

Every day you get to choose. To be the boss in someone's very bad story. Where there's a suffix on everything they learned while working with you. Or not. Either way, no one's going to stop you.

- Melissa and Johnathan