First lesson in how to be successful? Resist the urge to be agreeable…

Here’s Chris Dillow’s thumbnail guide to being successful.

1. Don’t be nice.

2. Be irrationally overconfident.

3. Be a narcissist. (“despite the fact that narcissistic bosses do no better a job on average than others – and might even be positively dangerous“)

4. Be a psychopath. (“charm, fearlessness and a lack of empathy or moral code are useful for career success”)

Now, to be clear, Chris is not talking about politics here. He’s talking about leadership in commerce. In particular those big institutions which dominate the commercial life of nations just now. Of which he notes:

I say all this as a counterweight to Deirdre McCloskey’s claim that a market economy fosters virtues such as trustworthiness and sympathy. Maybe so. But we don’t live a purely market world. Instead, we have large islands of Stalinism within a market sea. And the characteristics required to prosper within Stalinism are, well, Stalin’s ones.