Explaining Corporate Culture Through "The Office"

Writing in the ribbonfarm.com blog, Venkatesh Rao uses The Office to explain and illustrate a theory of management he calls the Gervais Principle (after the TV series's creator). Taking off from Hugh MacLeod's cartoon laying out a corporate hierarchy in layers of Sociopaths, the Clueless, and Losers, Rao riffs on and updates the Peter Principle, in these terms: "Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into [clueless] middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves." Don't know about you, but this analysis suddenly makes sense of much that mystified me in my sojourn in corporate America.

Comments

Yes men

[MichaelSmith]

Where I work a sure fire way to get promoted is to do exactly what your boss says, no matter how stupid or badly thought out. The boss is alwaye right.

The result is that middle management is crammed with hyper reactive former engineers who jump from task to task on a seconds notice and literally cringe when the phone rings.

The final result is that out product line is a mess of modules built with incompatible tool chains, and our actual code is a mess of short term hacks.

Fuck.

Re:Yes men

[Anonymous Coward]

You, sir, are either clueless or an authoritarian manipulator yourself. Your definitions are erroneous and not a little bit pompously wrong. A sociopath is not the same as a psychopath. A sociopath is aware of connsequences that affect him, though he may be guiltless and conscienceless in regard to effects of his actions on others. A psychopath on the other hand often does not care about effects on him, he will carry out destructive actions without bothering to worry about the future.

In my career I've run into a more than average number of sociopaths in marketing positions and have come to realize they rise because they lie slickly, are destructive to companies without caring what happens as long as they benefit from their actions and are not personally damaged. I've also seen sociopaths in engineering and non engineering positions, and at the top of companies.

And your last sentence is hogwash.

Re:Yes men

[Anonymous Coward]

Peter Gibbons: The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care.

Bob Porter: Don't... don't care?

Peter Gibbons: It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime, so where's the motivation? And here's something else, Bob: I have eight different bosses right now.

Bob Slydell: I beg your pardon?

Peter Gibbons: Eight bosses.

Bob Slydell: Eight?

Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.

Re:Yes men

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no problem doing what the boss says. Seriously. As long as my personal life is not affected and they pay me what I ask, then they can very well ask me to mop the floors or serve burgers in the cafeteria (all things I've done). Really, If they request something that is contrary to another request (i.e., prevents the previous request from being completed) then I let them know in writing:

"OK, I can work on this. Please be aware that this request will delay Task A by X days. Do you want me to proceed?"

  I don't care as long as they pay me. I love technology, but work is work, and I have no need for it to be fulfilling. I do my work and do it well, but it is after all, just work.

Not just corporate culture...

[feepness]

Any bureaucracy. Government as well.

Sadly, all are lofty goals eventually come down to a sociopathic bureaucrat acting solely to benefit himself.

"multiple bosses"

[Kupfernigk]

Clearly you have never worked in an environment when one boss has several personalities, they change several times a day, and each one contradicts what the last one just said. And it's no good getting things in writing because the claim will then be that you've "misinterpreted" it, as in "when I said black you should have realised I meant white."

It took me two years to realise that this was a deliberate boss strategy by a clueless middle manager who was overpromoted, and was using it to freak out his underlings. More usually the multi-personality boss has only two personalities, the before lunch and the after lunch, resulting from a lunchtime session with his or her personal psychoanalyst (Dr. Jack Daniels).

Re:"multiple bosses"

[rtb61]

Well, no, you have met the sociopath. They spend all day, seriously, all day plotting and scheming how to get ahead or how to entrench themselves in their current position. The plotting and scheming includes the two most important skills of the sociopath, how to blame others for the mistakes the sociopath makes and how to take the credit for the good work down by others, often simultaneously ie. they bugger up come to you for solution and before you know it, you made the mistake and the solution becomes theirs.

The multiple personalties are nothing more than masks and they will create and use as many as they need to further their schemes, The most difficult part is surprise, surprise, they get into their position via nepotism, best solution, leave, you might as well if you are any good you will be targeted for termination as they will recognise you as a threat, unless of course you are a willing accomplice in their inevitable criminal schemes to rip of customers, other staff and of course investors, in that case watch out, they will have a plan in place to ensure you take the fall while they take the money.

Now you might think sociopaths are smart, that is not really true, what you have to realise is, they really do spend all day every day, day in and day out, plotting and scheming, ingratiating those who will benefit them and back stabbing threats. They really do derive very little pleasure from life it is a part of their mental disease and ties in with they, from their own point of view, being the only person in existence, everyone else is an artefact, a piece of furniture, a chair to be sat on or thrown against the wall.

Re:"multiple bosses"

[postbigbang]

Sociopathy may look like a 'disease' but it's really a condition, and it's not 'curable'. Only the behavior can be modified, often with conditional behavioral therapy/CBT. But the sociopath usually doesn't see the errors and is unmotivated to want to modify their behavior.

These individuals are, IMHO, a separate and distinct species as while they may have homo sapiens bodies, their minds do not think like the vast majority.

I have autistic relatives, and the same can be said of them.

Add a sociopath to management, and you're screwed, generally. It usually ends badly for them, thus intensifying their resolve, too. Best of luck to those working 'under' the PHBs.

Re:Balance of interests

[Daniel Dvorkin]

These days, the leeches at the very top have learned to set things up so that they don't have any interest in the company's success: if the company does well, they get huge bonuses, and if it does poorly, they get "fired" with equally huge golden parachutes. The whole synergy idea is beloved of management theorists (i.e. people who have a special talent for stringing buzzwords together) but it bears a steadily decreasing relationship to how things happen in the real world.

Right...

[muecksteiner]

So what makes anyone think that this sort of behaviour is confined to the corporate world? Just consider academia. I mean, if there wasn't exactly the same kind of thing going on there, there would be no PhD Comics (a.k.a. "Dilbert for Academics"), right?

A.

Re:Right...

[muecksteiner]

Actually, academia is experiencing the same kind of socio-dynamical problem that is plaguing the business world - only with slightly different constraints, and one aspect that actually makes it much worse (more on that further on). Common to both environments is that there appears to be a tendency inherent in the system to select exactly the wrong kind of persons for leading positions.

In academia, you *do* have honest researchers who do not put their name on the publications of everyone else in the lab, regardless of whether they contributed to these. They are just at a significant disadvantage against paper-grabbers, and practically the only thing that can allow honest scientists to proceed along the career ladder are honest *senior* scientists, and professors. But once a particular university has become infected by paper-grabbers, it is very hard to get rid of them again - actually, they will tend to take over the system, once they have gained a foothold (a bit like academic kudzu, if you will).

One defining feature of such individuals is that they do not have much of a scientific vision in their field, but they do know how to game the system. Which means that their only vulnerability is a lack of precisely the qualifications one would expect in an academic - a truly deep understanding of some area in their field of research. This is the reason that the one sort of person those paper-grabbing fast-track "scientists" abhor most within a department are actually precisely the persons who ought to be there - thorough, methodical workers who do *not* brag about their achievements all the time. These guys are the only ones who can actually say "look, the emperor has no clothes!", and as a consequence, are dangerous to them. So the career-minded paper grabber will often try everything he can to get rid of the genuine scientists around him.

For these reasons, the two types of academic usually get on like cats and dogs, but usually, only one of them will advance along the career ladder - no karma points for guessing which of the two this is going to be. Fast forward after a couple of decades of such social dynamics taking place, and presto!, you end up with precisely the sort of universities we have now.

And the peculiar personnel structure of universities means that these effects have a much worse effect on the overall organization than they have in the corporate world.

In practically all cases, corporations have a dedicated career track for management, so there is at least a small chance that the lurid social dynamics of leadership promotion will only damage the ethos and effectivity of management. At least in theory, the actual productive part of a company can go on doing its thing, even if management are at each other's throats.

In academia, you do not have a second career track for the weasels. Once academic kudzu has spread to the top of the hierarchy, there very often is nobody senior left to do actual high-level work that is genuinely useful - so all sorts of improper things start to happen as part of everyday routine. PhD Comics, here we come...

I've gone to the Dark Side...

[DiamondGeezer]

...and become a manager. It's hard work with lots of moving parts that need to keep spinning and lots of things that need to be done by this or that timeline. My team members respect me and do as I ask because I'm not full of shit.

But when I reflect on managers that I've had, a significant number have been seriously mentally ill. I refused to work for one recently when I realised he was paranoid schizophrenic (and I know what I'm talking about on that one).

Those managers appear to have been chosen because of their mental illness which makes them unable to empathize with their underlings and spend most of their time in controlfreakery or worse to keep the people below off balance and never know whats going on.

Not too many sociopaths but plenty of managers with schizophrenic spectrum type disorders.

Re:I've gone to the Dark Side...

[Bigjeff5]

That, of course, is utter bullshit. If you are a good manager, and your team knows they can voice their disagreements without fear of being "silenced", you will have a team that universally respects you. You have to actually be a good manager that actually listens to the oposing viewpoints before making a decision, but universal respect is certainly within reach of any manager.

I came in to my current position as a manager like this was leaving. In fact he was being promoted by force - they were trying to transition him to upper management and he rejected the position many times, but his options became move up or work for someone else. Anyway, I've been here about eight months and I have yet to hear a negative comment about him. I've heard disagreements about decisions he made, but as far as I can tell he is universally respected and widely considered one of the best bosses my department has ever had, and we have people who have been working in this department for 30+ years. His replacement is pretty good too.

It really helps, I think, that these guys were moved up from within the ranks of the department, and so they know what the hell they are talking about technically. It sucks trying to explain things to a manager that doesn't have a clue how basic stuff works. They have to make big decisions and sometimes they just don't know enough to make the best choice. Unfortunately this is often because they place too much trust in the advice of a person of moderate importance trying to hang onto and expand their power and influence.

I'm glad I'm not a part of this

[dingen]

Every time I read this sort of stuff, or watch The Office, or read Dilbert, I'm glad I've never worked for a company with over 20 employees.

Re:I'm glad I'm not a part of this

[Anonymous Coward]

This is slashdot. He was making the website.

Ockham's razor

[dugeen]

Don't attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.

Re:The effect is the opposite of apparent intensio

[Maltheus]

Interesting in light of the fact that the only people that I actually see pin up Dilbert cartoons outside their cube are managers. I'd think, if white people can't use the N-word, then managers shouldn't be able to use Dilbert cartoons. But what you say rings true to me.

I also think that's the reason the 1st amendment enjoys the strong protection that it does in America, while the rest of the constitution gets continually crapped on. The iron fisted Hitlers and Stalins of the world have short lived reigns. But if you can convince people they have a say in what happens to them (even if they have no influence), then they'll put up with almost anything.

Re:Balance of interests

[Mab_Mass]

As far as I can tell, the trick to rising to the top of the corporate ladder is to mainly to WANT to rise to the top and to be good at the skill of rising to the top.

For example, at my job, I was hired as a lowly engineer, but by staying for a while, working hard, providing good input, etc. I eventually found myself in a strong managerial role. I was bad at it. I told the people above me when their project ideas were wrong. I reported bad news, and told them how long projects would take to do well.

Since then, I've fallen back into a purely technical role, and I watch how my replacement has been handling things.

As far as I can tell, his number one priority is not to make a good product - it is to report success to his supervisors. As long as things are done on paper, his bosses are happy, and he can pretend to be doing a great job. Meanwhile, he is thinking of this position largely as a way to put a few more years of management on his resume, so he can apply to a higher job. (This isn't just a guess - he told me this directly.)

All of this makes me think that a lot of people move up the ladder just because that is their goal and they excel at that specific skill. Yes, there are competent people who are reluctantly promoted and who stick it out in the interest of having the organization do good work, but I'm thinking more and more that these folks are the oddities.