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Psychos in Suits

Is your boss or coworker a psycho? While only one person out of 100 in the general population is a psycho, Robert Hare, author of Snakes in Suits, believes that four percent of corporate and political leaders are psychopaths. Hare says: "Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies."

In 2003, PricewaterhouseCoopers found that a third or more of 3,600 companies in 50 countries suffered from fraudulent activities. One quarter of these activities were committed by senior managers and executives. Fraud increased from 37% in 2003 to 45% in 2005. (Source: Snakes in Suits, Paul Babiak and Robert Hare, HarperCollins, 2006.)

Corporate psychos are:

Charming and charismatic
Smart and shallow
Impulsive and easily bored
Arrogant power mongers
Compulsive liars
Irresponsible and remorseless
Copycats

Jon Ronson, author of the Psychopath Test, says: "Teach them empathy and they'll cunningly learn to use it" to manipulate their victims. These are the manipulators; others are macho corporate bullies.

Corporate psychos feel they are blameless of any wrong doing, even after being caught and convicted.

I say a psycho's only concern is What's In It For Me (WIIFM), not What's Best for the Common Good (WBCG).

Want to find out if your boss or coworker are psycho? Take the Psychopath Test:

With the greed heads on Wall Street bringing the economy to its knees and the power mongers in Washington doing their best to crash the economy again, I think we may have more psychos in positions of power than we can afford.