7.8 KiB
[RT][Non-Fiction] The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to “The Office”
-
Author: u/AmeteurOpinions Finally, everyone was working together.*
-
URL: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/
-
Score: 18
-
Created: 2015-09-16T18:59:12
Post:
Comments:
u/Anderkent [+7] (2 hours later)
Soo... this is internally consistent and enjoyable, and possibly an accurate depiction of the power behind The Office, but do you think it's a good model for behaviour actual companies?
u/Sparkwitch [+12] (3 hours later)
No, they're just cynical. I don't think poor management is about sociopaths or limiting damage. Poor management is a failure to recognize that management is its own separate skill.
People are promoted because they have been at the company a long time, or because they have been responsible for positive change, or because they butter up the right people in charge. NONE OF THESE THINGS GUARANTEE MANAGEMENT SKILL.
In an attempt to attract people with management skill, management positions pay more than non-management positions... therefore people without management positions (who may even be excellent at their original jobs) try to get promoted to management in order to make more money. In a situation like that - not unusual one by any measure - management is (at best) well-informed, but lacking the people and organizational skills necessary to maintain quality teamwork. They get resented as terrible bosses.
Other companies separate their management track from their implementation track entirely and wind up with a bunch of excellent leaders and motivators with almost zero idea how their employees do their jobs. They get resented as clueless bosses.
There are advantages and disadvantages to each, but it's more enjoyable to rant about failures than to dissect successes. Confirmation bias and negativity bias run rampant.
Fun article, though.
u/mcgruntman [+5] (5 hours later)
It's important to realise that "sociopath"/"loser"/"clueless" as used in The Gervais Principle don't hold their usual meanings, they're just arbitrary labels for archetypes the author defines.
u/AmeteurOpinions [+7] Finally, everyone was working together. (19 minutes later)
I can't actually vouch for the accuracy of this series since I have neither watched a single episode of The Office or worked in that sort of company. But I can say that I got a ton of long-lasting insight from this anyway.
It goes like this:
The Gervais Principle and Its Consequences
The Gervais Principle is this:
Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves.
The Gervais principle differs from the Peter Principle, which it superficially resembles. The Peter Principle states that all people are promoted to the level of their incompetence. It is based on the assumption that future promotions are based on past performance. The Peter Principle is wrong for the simple reason that executives aren’t that stupid, and because there isn’t that much room in an upward-narrowing pyramid. They know what it takes for a promotion candidate to perform at the to level. So if they are promoting people beyond their competence anyway, under conditions of opportunity scarcity, there must be a good reason.
Scott Adams, seeing a different flaw in the Peter Principle, proposed the Dilbert Principle: that companies tend to systematically promote their least-competent employees to middle management to limit the damage they can do. This again is untrue. The Gervais principle predicts the exact opposite: that the most competent ones will be promoted to middle management. Michael Scott was a star salesman before he become a Clueless middle manager. The least competent employees (but not all of them — only certain enlightened incompetents) will be promoted not to middle management, but fast-tracked through to senior management. To the Sociopath level.
And in case you are wondering, the unenlightened under-performers get fired.
Let me illustrate the logic and implications of the principle with examples from the show.
The Career of the Clueless
In Season Three, the Dunder-Mifflin executives decide to merge the Stamford and Scranton branches, laying off much of the latter, including Michael Scott. His counterpart, the Sociopath Stamford branch manager, whose promotion is the premise of the re-org, opportunistically leverages his impending promotion into an executive position at a competitor, leaving the c0mpany in disarray. The Dunder-Mifflin executives, forced to deal with the fallout, cynically play out the now-illogical re-org anyway, shutting down Stamford and leaving Michael with the merged branch instead. The executives (David Wallace and Jan Levinson-Gould) are completely aware of Michael’s utter incompetence. Their calculations are obvious: giving Michael the expanded branch allows them to claim short-term success and buy time to maneuver out of having to personally suffer longer-term consequences.
Jim’s remark on the drama is revealing. Comparing Michael to his exiting sociopath peer he says: “Whatever you say about Michael, he would never have done something like this,” a testament to Michael’s determinedly deluded loyalty to the company that will never be loyal to him. We can safely assume that Michael’s previous promotion to regional manager occurred under similar circumstances of callous short-term calculations by sociopaths.
So why is promoting over-performing Losers logical? The simple reason is that if you over-perform at the Loser level, it is clear that you are an idiot. You’ve already made a bad bargain, and now you’re delivering more value than you need to, making your bargain even worse. Unless you very quickly demonstrate that you know your own value by successfully negotiating more money and/or power, you are marked out as an exploitable clueless Loser. At one point, Darryl, angling for a raise, learns to his astonishment that the raise he is asking for would make his salary higher than Michael’s. Michael hasn’t negotiated a better deal in 14 years. Darryl — a minimum-effort Loser with strains of Sociopath — doesn’t miss a step. He convinces and coaches Michael into asking for his own raise, so he can get his.
If you like anything from slatestarcodex, you'll like this. By the end almost feels like reading Meditations On Moloch for the first time again. The rest of ribbonfarm seems great too, but I'm only scratching the surface.
u/thecommexokid [+1] (6 days later)
This is in that genre of things where I read the sentences and have trouble believing they actually refer to anything, in the philosophical sense. Like, does
A Sociopath with an idea recruits just enough Losers to kick off the cycle. As it grows it requires a Clueless layer to turn it into a controlled reaction rather than a runaway explosion. Eventually, as value hits diminishing returns, both the Sociopaths and Losers make their exits, and the Clueless start to dominate. Finally, the hollow brittle shell collapses on itself and anything of value is recycled by the sociopaths according to meta-firm logic.
actually mean anything? Once the analysis of individual Office scenes began, things got a bit more concrete, but there was still a lot where I don't actually know what was being talked about.