snakes in suits

BY ANTONELLA GAMBOTTO-BURKE

Snakes in Suits, by Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare, HarperCollins.

Robert D. Hare is to psychopathy what Arnold Schwarzenegger is to violence: our favorite interpreter, if without a jones for the real thing. FBI consultant and designer of the standard diagnostic tool for psychopathy, Hare is the author of Without Conscience and now, in conjunction with industrial psychologist Paul Babiak, Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work , a layguide to corporate psychopaths. Duplicitous investment bankers, doctors who score recreational narcotics, corrupt police officers, unscrupulous lawyers … organizations suffering under the mismanagement of such individuals are both educated in screening techniques by this book, and offered solutions.

In many respects, the corporate sphere fosters psychopathic behavior. Narcissism and insensitivity are considered a fair trade for the ability to thrive in what the authors refer to as “an accelerated, dispassionate business world.” John Dean, former Counsel to the President of the United States, noted that corporate scandals don't happen in vacuums. “Rather,” he wrote, ”they need a proper atmosphere … actions and activities must be noticed for a scandal to occur, and there must be an atmosphere intolerant of the action or activity for a scandal to occur.” The Corporation , an award-winning documentary, posited that the modern corporation is, in itself, a psychopathic entity: “Diagnosis: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath.”

Business structures and procedures have changed dramatically since the early twentieth century, when the turgid bureaucratic model optimized productivity. The mergers, acquisitions, and takeovers of the 1970s and 1980s not only trimmed a lot of corporate fat, but created a demand for an entirely new kind of player – not the steadfast “company man” of the past, but an entirely different model: the corporate predator. Similarly, technological sophistication accelerated the rate of change. “A tremendous burden has been put on large organizations,” Babiak and Hare write, “forcing them to reinvent themselves quickly in order to remain competitive. As almost a defensive maneuver, some large corporations have needed to merge, acquire other companies, or downsize.”

Attracted by “fast-paced, high-risk, high-profit environments,” disordered personalities thrive in such corporate instability. Toshihide Iguchi, Nick Leeson, John Rusnak, Christopher Skase, and Peter Young, say, or the number-fudgers at Adelphia, Enron, Global Crossing, Tyco, and WorldCom.

“In the journal Psychology, Crime, and Law ,” the authors report, “researchers Board and Fritzon administered a self-report personality inventory to a sample of British senior business managers and executives. They concluded that the prevalence of histrionic, narcissistic, and compulsive personality disorders was relatively high, and that many of the traits exhibited were consistent with psychopathy: superficial charm, insincerity, egocentricity, manipulativeness, grandiosity, lack of empathy, exploitativeness, independence, rigidity, stubbornness, and dictatorial tendencies.”

To corporate psychopaths, success is the best revenge. Nice girls, they reason, don't get the corner office. In What Would Machiavelli Do? The Ends Justify the Meanness , satirist Stanley Bing counsels aspiring players: “Crush them. Hear their bones break, their windpipes snap.”

Characterized by a disturbing lack of empathy, psychopaths have little insight into their behavior. Their life judgments are poor – this is evidenced by the disastrous family lives of many corporate high-fliers - and they rarely learn from experience, meaning that dysfunctional behavior is repeated ad infinitum. Their hallmark? Pathological lying. “They cross back and forth easily between lying and honesty during conversations,” the authors observe, “because they do not have the guilty feelings the rest of us have when we try to tell a lie.”

Another defining characteristic is the refusal to take responsibility. Psychopaths are never accountable. All blame is externalized (circumstances, fate, luck, brainwashing, the weather). “Pointing the finger at others,” Babiak and Hare conclude, “serves the dual purpose of reinforcing their own positive image while spreading disparaging information about rival and detractors. They do this by positioning their blame of other as a display of loyalty to the listener.” The psychopath's experience of “primitive or proto-emotions such as anger, frustration, and rage” is refracted as irresistible charm. Their impression management is famously near-faultless; all that matters is the objective - that is, to discredit those who see through them.

A far more aggressive psychopathic subclass brings to mind the leadership style of certain religious leaders and politicians – in particular, that of former Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett: “This group, the corporate bullies , seems to reflect many of the traits of the macho psychopath: they are primarily abusive rather than charming … [and] rely on coercion, abuse, humiliation, harassment, aggression, and fear to get their way.” Such emotional poverty and lack of conscience is often confused with masculinity, the ability to make “hard decisions,” and effective crisis management.

As Babiak and Hare emphasize, the reality is that “there is no evidence that psychopaths derive any benefit from treatment or management programs.” Hare's Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), a rating scale rather than easily-falsified self-report tests, involves a qualified person to write an assessment based on an in-depth interview and clinical records. The authors suggest that similar techniques implemented in corporate employment processes would, in the long run, save serious money. Intrigued? Buy the book. However wooden in parts, Snakes in Suits is a valuable addiction to any business library.

*Originally published in The Weekend Australian