There is no such thing as a smart asshole. There are lots of different lines of intelligence. Howard Gardner of Harvard wrote a book making the case that cognitive abilities were only one of about a dozen intelligences, including musical, visual-spatial, verbal-linguistic, kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and existential. There might be 24 or more different, measurable, verifiable lines of intelligence. But none of these reflect your real intelligence.

The great football coach John Madden was once asked whether he would tolerate a player like Terrell Owens on his team. Owens was both one of the most talented players in the game and one of the biggest jerks. The bus must leave on time. In business, intelligence is always a critical element in any employee, because what we do is difficult and complex and the competitors are filled with extremely smart people. Being effective in a company also means working hard, being reliable, and being an excellent member of the team. Still, you can take it too far. I did.

Nothing makes me more hesitant to become invested in a book or TV show than a smart teenage boy calling a girl "fat" or "ugly" under his breath of course in that wordy, needing-to-be-clever sort of way. More specifically, my problem is rarely with a character acting cruelly and simultaneously being intelligent, but instead when a writer has his or her characters use obnoxious, hateful remarks in order to appear like they are above everyone else. As if being unjustifiably disrespectful and purposely having no filter makes them superior somehow.

As Stanford Business School professor Bob Sutton has pointed out, the world sure seems full of jerks these days. Maybe it's our politics, maybe it's an effect of online life, maybe it's that Mercury is in retrograde probably not , but whatever the reason, being a bully and an egomaniac just doesn't seem as limiting as it did in the past. Should we all conclude from this reality that the sad truth is being a jerk is actually a smart strategy? Should you even put up with a few in your office? Even if you set aside the considerable mental toll of working with jerks , science is pretty clear on the answer to this question.