The Truth About Better Decision-Making (Collection), 2/e

Truth 22. The bad will do you good

You might not believe in divine retribution, but you have an employee who makes you wonder what you did in the past—or past life—to deserve this nightmare now. Whatever it was, it must have been pretty bad.

He gets the job done, and then some, so you can’t ding him on performance. Darn it. But he has zero respect for authority, not to mention lesser social conventions like, say, socks. His work schedule seems to be synchronized to a time zone on the other side of the planet. So you can just forget about him showing up to any regular meetings, which is just fine by you anyway.

He’s subversive, sarcastic, hard to motivate, and impossible to threaten. When your more gentle creative employees come up with a good ...