Skip to main content
Take Test

INTJ Career Interview #1

Interview by Ryan Smith

Disclaimer: The following interview contains strong language and disparaging remarks and may not be suitable for all audiences.

Good to have you doing the interview, Michael. To begin, what is your background for identifying as INTJ?

I had my own company, and for purely utilitarian reasons, I was researching ways to manage people because I was not having much success with it. First, we started doing other systems, like DISC, but they failed to catch my interest. Later I stumbled upon the MBTI in my research. When I read the description of my type - "likes to build models, applying the criterion 'does it work?'" and so on - that really resonated with me. It wasn't just the Forer effect, because it would not apply to other people. I always felt I was different without knowing why. It was just a feeling in the back of my head with no way to crystallize that. And reading these words, it finally clicked.

I went crazy, signing up on these internet forums dedicated to typology and the MBTI - I was really naive, expecting to encounter other INTJs like me and not the fake INTJs that are hanging out on those boards.

We rolled out the official MBTI in my firm and all. I was enthusiastic about it, but the employees were suspicious. The management and I tried to reassure them, telling them to simply answer the questions honestly, but I can't say that we had much success. I mean, they said they would comply, but I could see in their actions that they were not complying. I couldn't spin it in a way that made it seem fun to them.

Alas, when the results were in, 40% of the company came back as NTJs. I was like, "Oh my God, this is the worst failure ever." A company of 50 people with 40% of them coming out as NTJs. It was clear that they were all emulating the company leaders. It was then that I understood how incredibly biased some of the S-type portraits are and how S types really have an amazing ability to emulate the group and to pick up on what is expected of them. In many ways, these abilities are much more developed in S types than in N types, since N types are often preoccupied with what's going on in their own heads and failing to take stock of what's in front of them.

So you actually got a bit ahead of my questioning, but what is your education and what do you currently do?

I have a BA in Computer Science. Actually, I didn't want to go to university at all. I couldn't see the value of it. My mission was to increase my possibility space; to give me space and opportunities to do what I wanted, and money was a constricting factor. So I wanted to optimize that. For those purposes, I didn't see the value of studying Computer Science at all, even though I worked in tech. I actually was running a cutting-edge tech company while I was studying Computer Science, so I could tell first-hand how what we were learning was really of limited value. I wanted to drop out, but my INFJ sister pressured me to keep going, and so I got my degree, even though I'm not proud of it and have never needed it.

So would you agree with Bill Gates who said: "Say you added two years to my life and let me to go business school. I don't think I would have done a better job at Microsoft." - Is that your perspective as well?

Well, the thing is, most NTJs rationalize what they are doing - of course all people do, but I think NTJs are especially bad in this regard. I would say that university was good to me because it was there I met this INTP who has been my lifelong friend.

Some of the philosophy of science classes that I took were also mildly interesting, but overall, if I look at the quantity of time that I spent at university, I would say that it was not worth it. However, the formation of the friendship with my INTP friend has truly been worthwhile. Though I've spent the entirety of my adult life mingling with the upper rungs of the business world, I've never met anyone like this guy. I've met other INTPs, of course, but no one who was as intellectually curious about theory as him. Since I left the corporate world, I've gotten into some social circles where there are also smart INTPs - people who resemble my friend - but unfortunately I find that it's harder to make friends in your thirties than it was in college. Even if both parties want to be friends, the encounters that you have are not as conducive to the formation of deep friendships as they were back in your teens and early twenties.

You've already mentioned that you own a company. Could you tell us a bit more about that?

Yeah, I started my first company back in high school. I needed money and I already knew quite a bit about computers. So I got together with a friend and started buying assorted hardware parts which we built into functioning computers and then sold with a markup to people we knew. We did that for about a year, until it dawned on us that for every computer we sold, there would have to be manual labor involved. That was a terrible way to make money. So I went into the internet business instead, selling internet and web hosting services to companies and private persons. That was a much better solution, because in that line of work I didn't have to put work hours into each individual sale, and the income from each sale would be recurrent every month. I got into the business at a time when many aspects of that market were artificially limited or scarce, and so I was at the cutting edge of the developments as they took place.

In a way, this sounds a bit like the investment banking market of the early-to-mid-2000s when there was also a lot of money to be made for those bankers who were among the first to aim accessible trading platforms at private and small-time investors?

Right. You have to be in the right market at the right time. That's the best way to strike it rich if you come from nothing (like I did). Back then, people didn't know anything about the internet. They just knew that they wanted to get on board. Things are much harder now and the competition is much tougher.

In business theory, there's this thing called Red Water / Blue Water Theory or the Blue Ocean Strategy. Red water is the territory that's already infested with competition - where the sharks are tearing each other apart and the water is red because it's full of blood. Blue is uncharted water - where you set out to find new territory, hoping that you might discover America or a lucrative new trade route to India. But at the same time, you're running the risk that there might also be nothing for you there.

The best way to get rich is to find virgin blue water. So you should keep that in mind when you are listening to these talks by tech gurus who made it big in Silicon Valley - they are offering you the specifics of their personal history, and most of what they are telling you will be useless. Their blue water has long since turned to red water by now, and in many cases these guys wouldn't be able to identify new blue waters even if they wanted to.

So what was it like for you to run a company?

I put some of my personal idiosyncrasies into the practices of the company. For example, in the early days my company did almost no marketing. Many years later, that would actually become a major problem for us, because another company came onto the scene and they had a really big marketing budget.

To me, marketing seemed inane. I thought that people would just want the facts about our product and not a lot of flabby BS to go around it. That they'd make a rational analysis based on the data given. I thought that was how people operated, because that was how I operate. But when this other company came along and had great marketing and a decent product to boot, that made a lot of trouble for me.

Once you go from having hundreds of customers to having thousands of them, the service level that your company is able to provide inevitably goes down - it has to go down. So customers will complain, and when they do so, they will feel even more disgruntled if you don't have that layer of marketing love and fluffiness surrounding the product. So marketing actually has the value of giving the customer some positive emotions about his relation to the product.

Love and fluffiness - it took me 10 years to learn that lesson.

But then you stepped down as CEO - why?

Well, I had been there for 14 years, which I felt was really too long. I got tired and bored. But for some reason, I had had a strong premonition that I should stay. Even though I dislike routine and disliked some of the things about running a company, I suppressed myself for it - sacrificed myself for it, even though it was not in my best interest.

When I see some of the things you're doing now, like teaching yourself genetics and reading Hegel, I can see how the business world would eventually have become too intellectually constraining for you.

Yeah, the challenge was solved. The business was essentially solved. In my last years as CEO, I actually over-optimized the business because I was so tired of going about the daily routine of running a company. I commissioned teams that discussed enterprise architecture. I built a lot of structure into the company that was way ahead of the needs of a company of that size. For example, I instituted matrix management and top-down hierarchical as well as cross-functional structures and cross-purpose chains of command. In the end I was weighing the company down with complexity just to tickle my own intellectual fancy. I was trying to make it all more complicated than it had to be.

So what are you doing now?

I'm reading and researching, enjoying the freedom that I have. It's been a couple of years since I've stepped down, and since I felt that I had to do something, I've gotten myself NTP'd into this little tech startup where I advise them and own some of the shares. "NTP'd" is my term for when you just kind of put something out there and then wait for the feedback from the market. That whole way of thinking is just alien to me. I usually start with a definite goal that I have in mind and want to achieve in the world rather than letting the current state of the world shape me.

There are still lots of fields where one could achieve high goals. Healthcare is a field that's rife for a shakeup. The whole model that we base our health practices on is basically the same as it was 75 years ago. It's overly credentialized, and heavily bureaucratized - bloated and unwieldy, really.

I could see myself working on restructuring healthcare, but no surefire way to accomplish a major goal in that sector has emerged in my mind so far. My intent upon stepping down as CEO was to start something new immediately, but I was tired. I really was not conscious of how worn down I was both physically and intellectually - the business world was getting to me after 14 years of continuous effort.

These days it feels natural to be more relaxed - I no longer feel that I have to apply myself 100% to solving grand goals all the time. But in the back of my mind I'm still annoyed that some of the big goals that I want to see achieved are not getting realized. It doesn't have to be me who achieves them; I just hate to see a subpar state drag on. Inefficiency is one of my hot buttons - the sight of inefficiency annoys me on a daily basis.

I'd like to hear you talk more about what it was like for you to run your own company. How did it suit you?

I enjoyed the sense of achievement and how it was easier to function with a PA. I also enjoyed getting respect before I had even opened my mouth - I didn't have to justify my position; people would just be like, "Yes, Michael," whenever I said something. Luckily I had my INTP friend from university whom I mentioned before to keep me grounded - he didn't give a fuck about the fact that I was CEO and he would always call it as he saw it. People would be shocked when he disagreed with my opinion or the assessment of a situation. He was really very valuable to me.

It was also nice to be able to exercise my will - if I wanted something done, it got done. As CEO it is obviously far easier to get something pushed through an organization than if you're not the CEO. For example, at one point I saw a piece of innovative software that would combine a lot of the services that we were offering and put it all onto a common platform. But no one in the company had any qualifications for operating that type of software. Had I not been the CEO, people might have resisted my suggestion that we switch to that application because they wouldn't like the idea of having to learn new skills. But as CEO I could simply make the decision to switch and implement that change because I knew it had potential. The fact that my employees didn't have the skills to operate the software didn't enter into it. They had to do as I said and acquire those skills.

I didn't appreciate the social aspect of being CEO - I didn't like patting people on the head and saying, "Good job." I tended to shut myself in my office and focus on strategies instead. I didn't cooperate a lot, neither with my employees nor with representatives from other companies. While I was CEO, we could have made alliances with other firms - alliances that would have boosted the bottom line - but I was always more focused on my own strategies.

That's why I knew that I wanted an ESTP to succeed me as CEO. Smart ESTPs are really great at working with the opportunities that are handed to them - they understand the art of taking sound fundamentals and making the most of them. An alternative candidate was an ENTJ who also made a bid for the post as my successor, but he would have been a continuation of some of the weaknesses that I exhibited as CEO. Neither of us knows how to schmooze people. Not so with the ESTP: He's incredibly good at schmoozing with both the employees and the customers, and he's good at adapting himself to the fundamentals of what he's inherited. On top of that, he's also extremely talented when it comes to anticipating what customers want. For example, he went down to our labs and looked at some of the projects that the ENTJ and I had been cooking up, but which we had essentially pulled the plug on because they were not performing. The ESTP took some of these programs and rebooted them with a handful of front-end changes that proved to really connect with the customer. So in a way, he really enabled some of our ideas to go where we could never have made them go ourselves. It's like we built the racecar, but it's the ESTP who's the fuel.

At this point, we usually ask the interviewees what the worst job they ever had was, but it seems like that question could be hard to answer in your case, since you have been self-employed since high school.

Well, what can I say? I'm not good at working for other people. Anything that involves physical work or routine is not for me. I dislike having to interact with other people and I dislike things where I don't have autonomy. I must have agency and be free to do whatever the fuck I like without having to answer to bureaucrats and worried middle managers. I am naturally drawn to fields where I can take a shitty inefficient state and turn it into something good.

So there's no dead-end job you can name as having been a dreary or bad experience for you?

That's right. I will forever be robbed of those fun memories. I did not have an opportunity to acquire such thrilling vistas to look back at.

***

INTJ Career Interview #1 © Ryan Smith and IDR Labs International 2015.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and MBTI are trademarks of the MBTI Trust, Inc.

IDRLabs.com is an independent research venture, which has no affiliation with the MBTI Trust, Inc.

Cover image in the article commissioned for this publication from artist Georgios Magkakis.

***

IDRlabs offers the following Career Interviews:

FREE