Stanley Bing’s Crazy Boss Quiz

Fortune columnist Stanley Bing (that is a pseudonym, his real name is Gil Schwartz) has just come out with an updated version of his 1992 book Crazy Bosses, which is is about " The crazy boss in all his guises: the Bully, the Paranoid, the Narcissist, the Wimp, and the self-destructive Disaster Hunter." 

I was amused and delighted by the online test that he has developed to assess "Is Your Boss a Crazy Boss?." Consider the first of the ten questions:

1. Your boss calls you…
a) At a reasonable hour in the morning, after you’ve had time for your muffin.
b) The moment you get into the office, but basically just to schmooze.
c) While you’re in the shower
at 7 a.m., to scream at you for something that was resolved a week ago
but you never had a chance to tell him about because he was too busy
screaming at somebody else about something that was resolved the week
before that.
d) At 3:30 a.m. just about every night to babble in drunken incoherence into the phone.

Bing casts his net beyond asshole bosses.  But he talks a lot about different forms of jerks and bullies. So if you combine Bing’s test with the ARSE (Asshole Rating Self-Exam), the checklist that we developed with Guy Kawasaki, and Linkedin to assesses if your future boss is an asshole, and ARSE Mail, there is a growing battery of asshole assessment and management tools out there.  Perhaps the next step is to apply a bit of evidence-based management to these tools, and to figure out when and if they are useful.

P.S. As I reported earlier, The ARSE Test is now over 100,000 completions! Aaron at Electric Pulp tells me 102,123 this very minute!


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