But such subtleties may be lost on CEOs, middle managers and wannabe masters of the universe who are currently devouring the Steve Jobs biography and thinking to themselves: "See! Steve Jobs was an asshole and he was one of the most successful businessmen on the planet. Maybe if I become an even bigger asshole I'll be successful like Steve."

This sort of flawed thinking -- call it asshole logic -- isn't something that's necessarily endorsed by Jobs's biographer.

"(Jobs) was not the world's greatest manager," Walter Isaacson said in a recent interview with 60 Minutes. "In fact, he could have been one of the world's worst managers."

But asshole logic, not surprisingly, tends to ignore facts that don't sanction one's own assholery. This distorted reasoning was already prevalent before Steve Jobs's death, and is only likely to spread as Isaacson's biography closes in on becoming the best-selling book of 2011. Five years ago, when Stanford professor of management science and engineering Robert Sutton was researching his book, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't, he ran across a disconcerting number of Silicon Valley leaders who believed that Steve Jobs was living proof that being an asshole boss was integral to building a great company.

Sutton's counter-thesis was that assholes--which he defined as those who deliberately make co-workers feel bad about themselves and who focus their hostility on the less powerful--poison the workplace and induce qualified employees to quit and are therefore bad for business, regardless of the asshole's individual talent or effectiveness.

When Sutton published an article in the Harvard Business Review advancing his theory, he was amazed at the reaction. He had published other articles in the Review, many of them longer and better researched, but nothing provoked the response that his asshole article did. Sutton received well over 1,000 emails, and gathered countless horror stories, including one about a worker undergoing chemotherapy whose boss told him he was "a wimp and a pussy."

What an asshole!

Sutton decided to expand the article into a book, and wound up interviewing dozens of Silicon Valley leaders and insiders. When Sutton would advance the notion that assholes are bad for business, one person after another had the same reaction: "What about Steve Jobs?"

"Even people who worked with Jobs told me that they'd seen him make people cry many times, but that 80 percent of the time he was right, " says Sutton. "It is troubling that there's this notion in our culture that if you're a winner, it's okay to be an asshole."

So many people advanced Steve Jobs as evidence that asshole CEOs build better companies that Sutton somewhat reluctantly included a chapter in his book on "The Virtues of Assholes," with Steve Jobs as Exhibit A. There is some evidence that "status displays" by aggressive bosses can motivate workers and give slackers a kick in the pants. And effective jerk bosses usually aren't assholes all the time, they're able to turn on the charm when the situation demands it, something Steve Jobs, by most accounts, was very good at doing. And it helps for companies to have skilled subordinate executives that are good at cleaning up after the Asshole-in-Chief, much like the sad-faced men carrying shovels who walk behind circus elephants.