{"id":348969,"date":"2026-03-16T12:08:11","date_gmt":"2026-03-16T12:08:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/348969\/"},"modified":"2026-03-16T12:08:11","modified_gmt":"2026-03-16T12:08:11","slug":"the-protected-species-who-gets-away-with-murder-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/348969\/","title":{"rendered":"the protected species who gets away with murder \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

When US president Donald Trump <\/a>turns for advice on his war in Iran, it is sobering to consider who he finds. <\/p>\n

There is his golfing friend Steve Witkoff, the spectacularly unqualified property developer who is Trump\u2019s special envoy to the Middle East.<\/p>\n

And Tulsi Gabbard, the spy chief who reassured Congress that intelligence experts believed Iran was \u201cnot building a nuclear weapon\u201d, before backing Trump three months later and claiming it could build one \u201cwithin weeks\u201d.<\/p>\n

But then, in a league very much of his own, there is the defence secretary, Pete Hegseth. The former Fox News host has denied allegations of sexual assault and alcohol abuse in his past, and continues to insist he did nothing wrong when he discussed plans for military strikes in a Signal chat that included a journalist last year.<\/p>\n

Few other presidents or prime ministers share Trump\u2019s taste for such colourful courtiers<\/a>. The same goes for top chief executives. It is hard to think of any leader of a global listed company <\/a>who would choose to have a Hegseth by their side.<\/p>\n

This does not, of course, mean that the business world <\/a>is free from underperformance. Far from it. But such weaknesses are rarely exposed by anything as dramatic as a war in the Middle East.<\/p>\n

If they were, it would be something to see what would happen to one of the most enduring and infuriating features of corporate life<\/a>: the protected species. <\/p>\n

I speak here of the office colleague who, year in, year out, gets away with behaviour that would spell dire trouble for anyone else. <\/p>\n

The one who treats managers\u2019 requests with disdain. Or never answers calls, or delivers woefully shabby work, when they do any work at all. How do they do it? Because they are deemed to be so favoured that they are untouchable. <\/p>\n

I say \u201cdeemed\u201d because the most fascinating members of the species may not even have that much support from above.<\/p>\n

In other words, they are not golfing pals, nepo hires or sycophants, or indeed anyone their superiors think much about at all. Rather, they have mastered the art of making everyone around them believe they are hugely valued by the chief.<\/p>\n

This typically involves frequent, tiresome mentions of what the boss privately thinks, likes and loathes.<\/p>\n

When Steve Jobs was developing the iPhone at Apple<\/a>, he pitted two of his star executives against each other to see who would come up with the best product, wrote the business journalist Fred Vogelstein in his 2013 book Dogfight.<\/p>\n

One of the pair \u201cdrove his colleagues mad\u201d, Vogelstein reported, by telling them \u201cSteve wouldn\u2019t like that\u201d, even though Steve was never in the room.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, actions rather than words are deployed. <\/p>\n

Feathers were much ruffled in the upper ranks of the Walt Disney Company in 1995 when then chairman Michael Eisner decided to make Hollywood superagent Michael Ovitz Disney\u2019s president.<\/p>\n

Top executives <\/a>who feared Ovitz lacked the experience to run a big public company were reportedly taken aback by his behaviour once he arrived.<\/p>\n

\"\"\u2018Over a billion eyeballs will be on the parade\u2019: St Patrick\u2019s festival CEO Richard Tierney<\/p>\n

\u201cOne habit especially vexed Eisner\u2019s inner circle,\u201d according to an account of this ill-fated episode in Vanity Fair magazine. \u201cEarly on, the company\u2019s new president developed the gesture of whispering in Eisner\u2019s ear \u2013 both in meetings and at public events.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ovitz was clearly doing this \u201cto show he literally had the boss\u2019s ear\u201d, Stephen Bollenbach, Disney\u2019s chief financial officer at the time, told the magazine.<\/p>\n

Even if this were the case, it did not work out for either side. Disney ended up paying Ovitz $140 million (\u20ac123 million) to leave after less than 18 months in the job, in a move that resulted in years of litigation.<\/p>\n

All this is a reminder that trying to build one\u2019s protected status by invoking proximity to power can be risky.<\/p>\n

A leader who does not know their relationship with an underling is being misused to gain advantage can be peeved upon finding out. And even if that does not happen, alienating colleagues with irksome ruses can prove dangerously self-defeating. <\/p>\n

I have always thought it smarter to work as most people do, by doing the best job they can and treating all around them as they would like to be treated themselves.<\/p>\n

Tricks might work for a while, but they can also backfire so badly that tricksters end up becoming not so much protected, but a sadly endangered species \u2013 Copyright The Financial Times<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When US president Donald Trump turns for advice on his war in Iran, it is sobering to consider…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":348970,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[72,9618,969,61,60,26574],"class_list":["post-348969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-disney","tag-donald-trump","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-pete-hegseth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=348969"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348969\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/348970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=348969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=348969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=348969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}