Like It or Not, Gladiator CEOs Like Bezos Fuel Society's Advancement

As The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon hits book shelves, we can add the company’s enigmatic CEO to the list of corporate leaders with bad tempers. Is it a coincidence Bezos and many others on that list also changed our lives in meaningful and positive ways? Doubtful.

Aggressive communication styles and angry flare-ups by technology luminaries have become commonplace. From Apple’s Steve Jobs to Microsoft’s Bill Gates and his successor Steve Ballmer and more, episodes of employee evisceration could fill the Roman Coliseum. In the case of Bezos, insiders even gave it a name – “nutters,” meaning a blood vessel in his head would start pulsating just before he unleashed on a subordinate, according to the book written by Bloomberg’s Brad Stone.

Such eruptions aren’t particular to the technology industry. Anyone who’s ever worked closely with the C-suite knows tempers often flare and the person standing in the doorway at the wrong time is going to get an earful. After all, CEOs are human, they’re under enormous pressure at all times, and occasionally need some release.

While this bad behavior defies the leadership attributes heralded by experts, you have to admit: it’s hard to argue with the results.

Since starting in 1994 as an online book store, Amazon has dramatically reshaped the retail landscape and now enjoys a market capitalization above $140 billion, with shares trading at $310. With the aid of Steve Jobs’ volatile leadership, Apple became the largest publicly traded company in the world. And some could argue Microsoft lost its focus after its bruising antitrust battle with the U.S. government left senior executives chastened against emboldened rivals.

Let’s face it: Building a business is a ruthless endeavor requiring equal parts brilliance, impatience and fierceness. Competition, by its very nature, requires an underlying desire to win at someone’s expense. (Don’t’ believe what they tell you in grade school these days.) It’s not a diplomatic endeavor, and it never has been.

Yet most business advice books such as Why CEOs Fail and What Got You Here Won’t Get You There recommend doing the opposite of these visionaries and others before them. Today, corporate cultures emphasize the importance of listening and providing positive reinforcement. They often reward those viewed as agreeable. An entire executive coaching industry has sprung up around teaching “emotional intelligence,” known as EQ, or your ability to control your emotions and those of others.

Clearly those are not qualities Bezos and others like him share. In fact, in Amazon’s 14 leadership principles, one entitled “Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit,” calls for leaders to be “tenacious” and “not compromise for the sake of social cohesion.”  And it certainly doesn’t reflect the behavior of industry vanguards from the turn of the previous century.

I recently read Fortune’s Children about the Vanderbilt dynasty, and Cornelius Vanderbilt didn’t become the richest man of his time by being mild-mannered and agreeable. Few in his life appear to have enjoyed any positive reinforcement. He was merciless, driving rivals out of business to gain control of shipping lines and railroads. His personal life wasn't much different. He ostracized his namesake son because he had epilepsy and had his own wife committed to an institution until she agreed to move into the new home he’d built in Manhattan.

Men like Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller and others advanced America and society during a different era – the Industrial Revolution. And as last year’s History Channel series “The Men Who Built America” depicted, they employed all kinds of cut-throat tactics and sharp words to propel a post-Civil War, largely agricultural country into the global superpower.

They were gladiators. They didn’t follow the rules because, for the most part, there weren’t any when you braved new paths. So while a Bloomberg BusinessWeek study puts the average tenure of an Amazon employee at about a year – a very short time versus more than six years at technology stalwart IBM, the question is whether it matters. After all, Amazon's innovation continues to drive America’s economic recovery; last month, Amazon announced it was hiring 70,000 holiday employees and had converted 7,000 temporary workers to full-time jobs.