There are CEOs that are narcissistic, and there are CEOs that have NPD. The first will be awful to work with, and the latter will destroy your life if you hang around long enough. This is from first hand experience.

I placed myself in-between a NPD CEO and the rest of the company I was at in an effort to fix the company culture which was toxic when I started. It took a year but it worked. I put in a lot of effort to make it a nice place to work at. I left after 2 years, and within 6 months the entire management staff had quit or was fired after I left.

People with NPD don't know they are monsters. They take credit and place blame without exception. They view everyone as beneath them and treat everyone as disposable. This guy said out loud that he doesn't like win-win deals - it must be win-lose. Taking something away from another person made him feel better about himself.

I'm not sure I'll ever heal from that experience.

It is hard to overstate how bad working for someone who meets the diagnostic criteria for NPD or BPD can be. There is a big, scary gap between someone being a bit egotistical, and someone who has NPD. Even being in a non-hierarchical relationship with someone with NPD can be capital B bad.

Personality disorders leave a huge wake of destruction when untreated and unrecognized. Also they are problematic and lead to a lot of hurt even when someone is recognizing the problem and working on it. Something that gets lost frequently in the dialog is the value, a seemingly critical value, that these people contribute to society even if it's at a great cost. A lot of times, especially in our current world climate as conversations about this topic grow, we otherize people who suffer from these conditions. IMO, that is dangerous. It creates a stigma and decreases the likelihood for a person with these conditions to allow themselves to see it for what it is and let it fester into constant malignant destruction of themselves and anyone near them. I personally steer clear of people with NPD/BPD. I was raised by someone with NPD and as such I can be kind of a magnet and ill equipped to set boundaries. My point is, people should educate themselves on the conditions and set boundaries and do their best not to enable, but those that can should encourage sufferers to acknowledge and integrate their disorder to reduce harm and utilize their unique minds in a way that takes other lives into account. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy does wonders. I realize it's almost being a human sacrifice to help someone with NPD or BPD transition thought patterns. I don't wish it on anyone... but someone's gotta do the work, this part of humanity isn't going to go away.

People with NPD almost never undergo any therapy for it. They literally don't see anything wrong with themselves. Quite the opposite actually, they are forever the victim of everyone else. OTOH the number of victims of narcissistic abuse seeking therapy is endless.

I agree with you... I'm just saying that people should educate themselves on the symptoms and RUN if they can't manage their boundaries. If they do have someone in their life and can lure them to therapeutic thought, that is a huge net good. What worries me about the current discourse is otherizing them like rounding them up will solve the problem. Do not work for them, do not date them, but do understand that they are humans and to otherize them is an open door for an amorphous scarlet letter that is very difficult to take back when wrongly applied.

I don't have a solution. I don't think in our society, we, have a solution. To some degree the NPD person is the exemplar ubermensch of what our society is selling us. Look at the gleeful schadenfreude and two documentaries about that Fyre festival guy. He WILL run for office at some point in the future and people will eat it up. They are a race condition of that operating within the exact terms that are fed to us all day telling us to succeed at all costs in ways that keep us all fucked.

I suspect the reason to vilify the vampire is to avoid looking at what made them and the knowledge that they'll always be a predator even when they know what not to eat. There are no good options, but I know the best option isn't making personality disordered people into untouchables. For one, they'd love that. They thrive on that and can dedicate more energy to gaming that than most people can imagine. Maybe that's how we got to now. I dunno, but I'm just advocating for some sympathy for the devil even if you stay far far away from it.

Check out the book Good To Great by Jim Collins. The entire book is about this exactly.

No no no, you ID'd a very important issue but dont go far enough.

You are not only right (as a CEO who def has some narcissism), but charisma \ narcissism is like crazy \ eccentric. The term changes historically post success. It becomes revisionism.

Going from 0 to 1 requires a ton of luck, but really the it's the belief that outsiders are wrong about the statistical odds from going from 0 to 1 and sticking with it till it works or you break. It takes an unreasonable personality to get there and then that unreasonable personality has to adapt to a more measured one to protect the turf. Its ironic but the sword that gets most startups early success kills it eventually.

Innovation in general is hard to do without outlier personalties in this realm.

I dont have a great solution, but I can confidently say that unreasonable people both change the world and torture loved ones.