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

Office space

[symbolset]

That makes better sense for slashdotters.

/I believe you have my stapler.

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

[cjfs]

Chin up, your situation can't be all that bad. I noticed you referred to "boss" in the singular. It only gets rough when multiple bosses say conflicting things that all must be correct. Then you have to start redefining words.

Re:Yes men

[DangerFace]

From the Oxford Dictionary of Psychology, the premier psychological dictionary of Britain:

sociopathy n. Another name for antisocial personality disorder. sociopath n. A person with sociopathy.

And here's the definiton of antisocial personality disorder:

antisocial personality disorder n. A personality disorder characterized by a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others, beginning in childhood or early adolescence and continuing into adulthood, with such signs and symptoms as failure to conform to social norms, manifested by repeated unlawful behaviour; deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying or swindling [confidence trickery] for pleasure or personal gain; impulsivity or failure to plan ahead; irritability and aggressiveness involving frequent assaults or fights; reckless disregard for the safety of self or others; consistent irresponsibilty involving failure to hold down jobs or to honour financial obligations; and lack of remorse for the mistreatment of others, as indicated by indifference or rationalization.

Please note that not all of these indicators need necessarily be present for a diagnosis of sociopathy, but my apologies, I don't have a copy of the DSMIV with me right now. In any case, jandersen is talking out of his arse, and has apparently made up a definition of sociopathy by watching some TV shows.

... but that is only a layman's opinion.

Yes, jandersen, it is a layman's opinion. Perhaps you have heard the saying "'tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt"?

Re:Yes men

[Nidi62]

DSM-IV: Diagnosis of anti-social personality disorder requires 3 or more of the following(after age 15): 1. failure to conform to social norms with respect towards lawful behaviors 2. deceitfulness, as indicated by repeat lying or conning others for personal pleasure/profit 3. impulsivity or failure to plan ahead 4. irritability or aggressiveness 5. reckless disregard for safety of self or others 6. constant irresponsibility(failure to honor financial obligations) 7. lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another

"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.

Balance of interests

[evilviper]

Sociopath's aren't necessarily a bad thing. They'll do whatever they have to for their benefit. If their benefit happens to benefit the company, SYNERGY! Symbiosis. Everyone's happy, capitalism works.

It works out, because even if some leeches find a way to benefit from what is disadvantageous to the company, there's someone higher-up who more directly benefits from the success of the company, and will either push the leeches in the right direction, or throw them out. The system works.

It only falls apart when the company is big enough that leeches go unnoticed higher up the chain.

I must admit that the corporate world is slowly turning me into a sociopath as well. I have lots of things that need to get done, diplomacy takes forever, and the brutally honest (naive) approach gets you in trouble. So, whatever simple tricks will get things going, in the direction they need to go, are fair game.

Yes, it takes a special balance of pathologies to make someone a manager, and when dealing with them, the only way to go is at least slightly dishonest manipulation. The standard forms of motivation that work with normal human beings just don't work with the collection of neuroses that coalesces into the form of a manager.

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.

Re:Balance of interests

[gadget junkie]

I've been working in corporate environment, and the terminal stage for me is really perceived as the steady, apex-state for the organizations. I usually observe these developments:

1. inward looking bias: the company is NEVER, at any stage, actively looking at its business in relation to objective realities. This gives a sense of control over its own destiny, akin to throwing the outboard motor into the sea because map reading is difficult.

2. since reality intrudes sometimes, a well cohordinated system of committee sterilizes the possibility to learn from mistakes; a good committee, as you may know, is something that uses time and resources to say "We've done the best that could be done, and the failure was due to unforseeable circumstances; proceed as before";

3. to avoid the possibility that the frontier parts of the organizations do an internal takeover, a good feudal system is essential. you must be able to dangle promotion to sinecures in front of those that have to face reality day by day;

The promotion system is like a priesthood: the first requirement is an ability and willingness to believe. Ability gets only disbelief

Re:Balance of interests

[Daniel Dvorkin]

What I meant by "these days" is that for most of the 20th century, executives generally went down with the ship. Sure, the top executives of a failed company were still going to be much better off than the Joe Schmoes who worked for that company, but they were also going to be much worse off than the executives of successful companies. It's only in the last generation or so that the C*O class has learned to insulate itself almost completely from any consequences of failure. I agree with you that this is a return to form; executives are the new nobility, and it took them a while after the fall of the old nobility in the 18th and 19th centuries to figure out all the tricks.

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...

Re:Hanlon's razor

[Anonymous Coward]

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity" -Hanlon's razor

"When you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better." -Occam's razor

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

[obarthelemy]

The simple fact that you think that everyone loves you is proof that you are deluded. And that you say so emphatically on slashdot, narcissistic.

The effect is the opposite of apparent intensions

[viking80]

Series like the Office and books like the Peter Principle makes "the sour pill go down". By that I mean that it gives the average guy a safety vent for frustration and irritation created by random acts of management as well as corporate cruel and unusual operations. It basically lubricates the workforce, and while they think they are part of a large group ridiculing management and the corporate culture, the end effect of this effort is not change or revolution, but, au contraire, submission, acceptance and cooperation.

It's not that simple.

[MaWeiTao]

To this day I'm convinced that the problem with corporate culture in the West is that people with business majors are running companies. The rationale seems to be if you majored in business, economics, etc that somehow you have a more intimate understanding of business and are better equipped to manage a business. The thing is how many people actually get into this field because they're passionate about it and how many do it simply because they believe it's the easiest way to land a job? I'd wager the vast majority of people are in the latter category. How many of these people chose a business major because there was nothing else they were interested in but felt they had to go to college to land an acceptable job? They probably should have taken a trade but that, apparently, is beneath most people nowadays.

So you've got these passionless, ignorant (regarding the nature of the business where they work), drones who manage to climb up the corporate ladder by virtue of their degree. The people who actually have the skill and perform the work (engineers, programmers, designers, etc) have more of a tendency to get stuck because they're perceived as most valuable in the position they're currently occupying. And of course, it's human nature to protect yourself once you're in a position of authority. And interesting contrast to this are government workers who rarely have to worry about job security and for that reason could care less about the job they do.

Needless to say, not everyone is equipped to manage. Everyone says they want to be a manager simply because of the prospect of earning more money but when it comes down to it they're not willing to deal with the stress and responsibilities the job demands. Although, larger companies seem to come up with all kinds of fluff titles in order to give their employees the illusion that they're progressing. But if there were more technical people in high level positions I believe we'd be seeing better American products, less outsourcing and more efficiency. It wouldn't solve everything, because we're still dealing with humans, but it would help.

I think Asia is a good reflection of this. Engineers and designers routinely are the people running companies. Business majors end up in marketing, sales and accounting, where they belong. So you've got people with more intimate understanding of the nature of their company's business. However, managers in Asia can be brutal in a way Westerners can't imagine and in a way they couldn't even get away with here. They're extremely demanding and can be openly insulting towards their employees. They routinely resort to name-calling. I've had friends who have had papers thrown in their face because their manager was unhappy with something they had done. I've heard of people getting slapped, although that's very rare and nowadays people are more likely to take legal action. But this sort of thing happens everywhere, Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, etc. Although it's likely worse in places like China.

Certainly, there's a level of elitism there. I have a friend who started his own company a few years ago and is tough on everyone who works with him. I have another friend who stopped working with him because she couldn't stand his tyrannical attitude. He's even rough with his own wife when it comes to work. But I've seen that level of demanding expectations from him even when it comes to service from a waiter in a restaurant or a hotel employee. Whatever problems he may have, I can't deny that he doesn't produce high quality work.

Americans are pretty bad about having pride in anything. And I've noticed this tendency to blame someone else for their own problems in order to justify their own shortcomings. Experience crap service at a store and what is the excuse the employee will give? They don't earn enough to care or their manager is a jerk. That's not an excuse. But they've all got this entitlement mentality and don't value quality. And with employees like that why should a manager care about anything but t

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

[HungWeiLo]

I've worked at a company with 1 colleague, a boss and the boss' wife.

So were you the guy holding the camera, or the guy doing the website?