Do you think aspies make good business partners or bosses?

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What do you think? Have you ever had the opportunity? I'm asking, because I would hope aspies would be more trustworthy.

PS to the mods, please don't move this to work and business, please. This is more about autism to me. Thanks!

For myself I would make a lousy boss because I don't like confronting anyone. Of course, I tend to do so many things alone that I'd probably also be a lousy business partner. But that's just me.

Absolutely. I've always been attracted to business. I once got in trouble once because I trusted a business partner too much and he ended up screwing us over. That's the only downside I see. Business is one of my special interests. I have integrity but I can also do some things that some may seem unethical.

Depends on the job. Where I work, I was boss for a year (interim appointment), and I was not particularly good at it. Things were going on, slipping, getting out of control... I ended up leaping in and filling in for several people on staff. As soon as the regular boss returned, that stuff all stopped. Still a mystery to me what exactly was going on. Apparently there was at least one office romance, one person looking for another job. I'm thinking an effective boss needs to be a bit more adept at detecting that kind of thing. Just saying...

When I was manager of a small copy center, I did okay.

I did okay at delegating. And I decided when I needed to fire people to be decent, brief, informative, and most important was brief.

I generally tried to be even-keel and middle-of-the-road.

I think it depends on the aspie. They can make good bosses and can make bad bosses.

Well it would depend on the aspie, what the job is, does the aspie like to do the job, ETC.

If I became a boss/business manager with a computer company doing something with computers than I probably would make an OK boss. I wouldn't be strict with rules and stuff.

I worked as both a first and second level supervisor for a few years. Both the employees and managers seemed to like how I did my job, in fact there were employees in other sections who wanted to work for me. We also had some of the highest production statistics in the organization. I've always credited the employees with our success, and I found that for me the work was highly stressful, requiring so much adaptation on my part that I developed a lot of stress and health issues while doing it.

The biggest problem for me was that I'm an extreme introvert, and that kind of job meant that people were coming at me from all directions for interaction, from up and down the chain of supervision - customers, employees and my bosses. There was constant interaction, via email, phone, walking into my office, even following me to the restroom.

I loved certain aspects of the job. The employees were for the most part fantastic - I felt incredibly blessed in that way, because I'd heard horror stories from others who'd tried supervision and wound up hated by those who worked for them. The work was challenging, and although too extroverted, it was satisfying to solve the problems we encountered, because we all felt we were providing an important service. But the stress took its toll and I retired from there in a state of burnout that took me a surprisingly long time to recover from.

I'm sure there are other supervisory situations that aren't quite so crazy to begin with and might have been better suited to me and not so stressful. I felt that I succeeded there, in spite of my eventual burnout, but I think maybe I tried too hard, tried to do everything too perfectly, and took it home with me too many nights.

I still feel that it was a good thing I had that experience. Considering how many times I've felt like a complete failure due to some Aspie-ish problem or other (long before I knew what Aspie was and just thought I was a freak), this gave me the opportunity to accomplish something that was so much bigger than my part in it - it gave me a success that I needed, to feel that I had a contribution to make. I'm just glad it's over.

I also think it depends on the person but if the business relates to a special interest then I could see it them being very successful.

I make a much better deputy than a manager, someone else handling the people related problems, while I can very effectively get on with the actual non-people related stuff associated with management. I've always ended up in this sort of position somehow, the ability to think and deal with details is valuable.

Jason