Word: jerks
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...reality, there's no such rise. The vast majority of Japanese remain knee-jerk pacifists, and you'd have a difficult time finding anyone among Japan's disaffected youth willing to die for much of anything, much less for the emperor. But the past still matters. It would be right - to Japan's wartime victims and to Japan itself - to have a memorial that honors the war dead without honoring the ideology that cost them their lives. As peaceful a square as any you might find in Tokyo, Yasukuni shrine could be that place, but only with a radically different...
...Talladega Nights, Ferrell and Baron Cohen exchange a long, firm kiss, after which Baron Cohen says, in his faux-French accent, "You taste of America." That's Ferrell's appeal. He's us, and U.S.: a bully and a sweetie, deranged and good-natured, a jerk and a hero. He's the American taste: burgers and fries, supersized...
...niceness campaign overtaking corporate America. It's called the No Asshole Rule, a mantra set forth in a current business best seller of the same title. It is already practiced by the most esteemed employers of the day--Google, Southwest Airlines--and is finding followers even where being a jerk was part of the job description. If the campaign is won, soon all but the pleasantest of us will be banished from the workplace. And I, for one, will be sorry...
...scholarly literature he cites. But something about Sutton's message hits a nerve. Maybe it's the epithet, which he defines helpfully as someone who persistently belittles and abuses those of inferior power or status. (As if we needed it spelled out.) Or maybe it's his argument that jerks exact a cost to the bottom line as they single-handedly corrode an organization's cohesion. An IT company he mentions went so far as to calculate a star salesman's TCA--total cost of asshole--by totting up expenses attributed to his behavior. Turnover, legal bills and anger-management...
Sutton cops to as much in a penultimate chapter titled "The Virtues of Assholes." His solution is to keep a token terror--one brilliant bully per office. Sounds reasonable. But beware, he warns: One jerk's nastiness can pollute the water cooler. Maybe that's not such a bad thing. We can all use a shot of malevolence now and then...