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

[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"?

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.

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...

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.