n the first place. When I sat with this person, and explained that his ideas were valuable-but needed some tweaking to be better-he was interested. When I sat with him and explained that his personality was holding him back, he was also interested. Within weeks of me working with him, he changed for the better. With leadership and mentoring, I was able to break the environmental reinforcements. How Not to Be a Computer Jerk Leadership and mentoring In my experience, people who behave like computer jerks can be changed. Usually, the instrument of change is someone who they respect and who has authority over them. In my case, I was working in a chemical manufacturing plant and thought I was the king of the world. I ran the minicomputer, managed all the PCs, and even managed the network, which at the time was a Santa Clara Systems Version 1.1 network with 10Base-2 coax cabling throughout the plant. (For those of you who don't know Santa Clara Systems, they merged with a company named Novell in 1986.) On one of the days when I was feeling particularly smug, I managed to offend my boss by speaking to him in a condescending tone when he needed help with something. This was a man whom I liked quite a bit, and admired a great deal, and from whom I had learned a lot. Still, at the age of 22, I thought I was smarter than he was. My boss called me into his office and calmly asked me what I knew about toluol, methyl methacrylate, and the dispersion process. When I said that I didn't know anything, he proceeded to explain to me that he knew quite a bit about all of these things, and then asked me why someone like me, who was probably a third his age, would think that I had the right to speak to him the way I had. He was right, and I knew it. I was being a jerk. The point of this story is that he took the time to tell me I was being a jerk, and did it in such a way that I listened. The fact that I respected him already helped a great deal, but the fact that someone pulled me aside and explained to me that I was out of line mad