It's strange to me that someone can be a good enough businessperson to get all the way to the executive level of a huge company, and still feel emotionally hurt that someone left to work at a competitor. That strikes me as a rather childish reaction to business as usual.
I was surprised at the reaction of my manager when I resigned from my first big kid job. I expected him to be supportive and happy for me as he had always been. Instead he seemed personally insulted as if I had betrayed him.
It was the right move for my career objectively but there seemed to be some resentment that I was "just in it for the money". Working a dead-end data analyst job at a company that is actively shipping its technical talent offshore was (and still is) not my idea of an attractive career path.
The HR rep pulled me into an impromptu meeting to find out what it would take to get me to stay. I told her I would need at least as much as the offer which was 40% more than my current salary. Her response was "do you think you are worth that?". I told her the other company thought so or they wouldn't have made the offer. Needless to say I didn't stay.
I wouldn't even call that mean so much as incompetent and desperate.
I'd maybe try to explain a little that my salary is actually set through a competitive process of interviewing so it's not a number I personally have to have believe in or not, and then maybe touch on why her comments smell of desperation and why that's not a strong negotiating position.
But I didn't say that "people evince childishness regardless of age".
I specifically said _jealousy_ is a trait attributed to humans as a flaw.
That has nothing to do with it being childishness or not. Otherwise it would be a trait somehow eliminated after childhood for a majority of adults, which it isn't since all of us (adults) experience it.
Furthermore, it elicits a sense of flight or flight, and causes a reaction, good or bad, I think. Again, it's a reaction; people in general aren't good at controlling those, nor do they last. A person can react as much as they want, but after a night's sleep, everything takes a different tone.
Our subconscious minds play a role that is probably undervalued. The jealous boss might wake up feeling relieved, invigorated.
It's referred to as a "childish" flaw because in children the prefrontal cortex is not yet developed enough to mediate base emotional responses like that.
Yeah, same feeling here as well. In his otherwise excellent book Shoe Dog, Phil Knight spent a paragraph talking about Rob Strasser, an early employee who left for Adidas, and about how it was a breach of loyalty.
Did you skip the middle of the book? Those two people went through a lot together, especially within the forum of facing-off with their competitors, one after another. Guy was integral to Nike and ultimately he chose to work for the "enemy." Think what you want, but either Phil Knight was too much of a douche for too long, which wore him thin, or he stabbed his boss in the back.
Seems plausible to me. I don't think it's an accident that the way we currently organize work looks like a giant primate dominance hierarchy. The people who rise to the top are going to be very good at that. (And hopefully good at business as well, but we can all think of counterexamples.)
TBH most men in the Valley are adult children, and always have been (looking at my mentor who's going on 70 now and was deeply involved in the early times of PC hardware). Childish behavior is hardly unexpected, and I truly do not mean any cynicism with this; it really is just a fact.
People may love to say "it's just business" when they do something that's hurtful to you; they'll still treat it as treachery when you turn the tables.
