In a 34 year career I’ve had two really bad bosses. Both were the same guy.
Back in the early 90s I’m a rising junior scientist and he comes in as R&D VP at our not for profit. Dude is insane. Has the break room couch moved into his office so he can work all night and take naps as needed. When he says he can meet with you at 4 he means 4am. Very smart guy but a complete babbling idiot by Thursday. He doesn’t understand this.
He has no feelings. He has learned to fake them. He will let you talk yourself out and then still force you to do the worst fucking project. He bails after 18 months and develops this reputation in the industry. 95% of subordinates hate his guts. 5% love him cause he plays favorites. Bosses love him cause he talks big. General consensus is that things get done inspite of him.
Fast forward to 2005ish. He crows at conference about his companies progress in making a technology advancement. Same field that my company works in (and we already have a commercial plant). Our company is privately held and plays things close to the vest. Our progress is massively ahead of what he gets credit for in public. We implement the new technology at full scale (fucking huge scale). We get a big award. I get to give the keynote. His company abandons the project. Satisfaction.
Later I do some work with his old company. I learn his acclaimed talk could have been published in the Journal of irreproducible results. See
He goes to a startup that gets lots of press and goes public early so he gets to cash out a few million. Grrrr. Their process sucks and is contaminated all the time. He leaves behind a trail of more broken people. Still his reputation with the money people is golden based on his boasts.
I join a different startuo as sr director of fermentation. I’m basically the most senior non executive in the company. About a year in he makes it known to our CEO that he’d like to join us (his startup had tanked). My opinion is known but the ceo is in love with him. So I have to say I’ll give it a try. Of course he gets put over me.
After spending 17 months getting a lot of shit fixed (40 phDs that didn’t know the first thing about stats, variance, how to factor costs). All I hear about is what hasn’t been done yet. I wake up at 6am with a full page micromanage emails.
I have literally sweated blood in Italy over the course of months. Have slept in the plant. Have worked very hard to gain the trust of our partners. He blows it all up on his first trip and basically shames and belittles the very sharp and prideful woman owner of the company. He essentially holds his breath until he turns blue until she relents. She hates him with the fire of a thousand suns.
I had a well thought out plan to go behind closed doors with just me, her and her #2 to pull the “we need to do this, I and my team just spent most of the past six months demonstrating our commitment and competence” card.it would have worked. At the end of my previous visit when we demonstrated our technology in the old mothballed plant she had bought she was so happy. I earned that trust and that fucker destroyed it in an instant.
Meanwhile, I have a friend begging me to come to Philly. It’s not really a job I wanted but I know that SOB was going to target me and my team and there was nothing I could do about it. I bailed.
He pretty much burned all his bridges and had a heart problem and retired to Florida though he still creates some problems in industry on a few advisory boards.
Pretty much every company I go to has someone that’s on the burned list. Four times I’ve heard “that man has no soul”.