Narnia? Seriously? Jesus. Setting aside the tremendous nerdery of that reference, it's not even appropriate beyond the idea of a stone menagerie, unless you're specifically going out of your way to compare the person to a truly elementally evil character, which I guess is what the author is trying to do.

***

Fun "corpspeak" in the Dunlap Student Success Center. You get the sense that a lot of their money just does donuts; they spend amost of their money on getting more money, and they will use that money to get more money, and so on from there.

***

We begin to see issues with the "checklist" idea, because it's worth asking to what extent the traits on the checklist are "correlative" as opposed to "indicative". If I see someone with a large stomach, and the "pregnant" checklist says that "inflated stomach" is indicative of pregnancy, that doesn't mean that the man next to me on the bus is pregnant! And, hopefully, the author will ask this question.

***

"With corporate psychopathy, it's a mistake to look at them as neurologically impaired." Which, I guess, is at the core of my annoyance at this book. The book's concept of "psychopathy" seems, to me, to be an inherently subjective decision; a moral distinction more than anything else. And so we see the author's extensive effort to interpret Dunlap as being a psychopath; it's because he's offended by Dunlap and is trying to find a way to objectively justify that offense. So if Dunlap is a psychopath, then hooray! We can hate him without guilt because we can dispassionately declare that he's abnormal. It's not that I just don't like him; that would be emotional and illogical and wrong. But he fits all the definitions on this checklist and so I am, in fact, morally obligated to dislike him.

It's not like Al Dunlap isn't a capricious bastard. It's pretty clear that he doesn't realize that being loud and tall trips everyone's Daddy Triggers and that's why he got to be a CEO in the first place. And they don't pay him millions of dollars because he's so good at what he does, they pay him millions of dollars because that's what CEOs get paid.

I doubt he was being a callous bastard because he was a psychopath; I bet he honestly believed that he was doing the right things for the right reasons and that everyone would be better off, because hey! I did this before and they paid me a million dollars and said that it had worked! Therefore this is the right thing to do.

***

"We hate writing about impenetrable, boring people." Well gee whiz, I'm sorry to hear that, unfortunately making boring things interesting is your fucking JOB.