From the US president firing dimwitted tweets at Kim Jong-un,to Hollywood moguls and actors exposed as sexual predators, and the oafish Boris Johnson blundering onwards: 2017 has been the year of the asshole. And the signs are that 2018 could be just as badLadies and gentlemen, or we contain reached peak asshole”. So,at least, claims Robert Sutton, and professor of management science and engineering and professor of organisational behaviour at Stanford University in California – better known as the Asshole Guy. Ever since he wrote his first book on the theme,The No Asshole Rule, in 2007, and despite that rule being applied by several companies keen to purge their ranks of toxic jerks (or at least keen to seem to do so),he has seen global levels of assholosity – if that’s the fair term – rise exponentially.
What this implies is that 2017 is the year of the asshole. And a brief survey of the self-serving, overwhelmingly patriarchal, and sometimes sexually exploitative and otherwise loathsome public stances taken by the year’s most prominent jerks – among them Harvey Weinstein,Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and Michael Gove and Kevin Spacey – suggests this to be the case.
Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk