Update to this post.  Yet another way to look at/think about the three categories of people Rao thinks define corporate life from Erik Dietrich.

 

• Pragmatists are line-level employees who find value in life outside of work, mainly because the hope of any meaningful advancement and enjoyment of their profession has been taken from them.
• Idealists believe heartily in the meritocratic company (and organizational superiors) as a benevolent steward of their careers because perspective has been taken from them.
• Opportunists refuse to yield hope or perspective and recognize that the only way to win the corporate game is to play by their own rules. In this realization, they give up ethical certainty and human connection –

I believe you've said it.

If bureaucracies generally do not get shut down, and individuals generally do not lose their jobs, the they can have inconvenient hours at offices in inconvenient locations. They can make lots of rules and forms that make life difficult for the very people that they serve. Even if no bureaucrat maliciously wants to make things difficult for anyone, in the absence of forces that weed out such inconveniences, they will only ever increase in prevalence.

I'll pull from my comment on your original article (written after you published both of these).

Politicians certainly rail against bureaucracies, but off the top of my head, I'm not aware of any bureaucracy that

Why your boss is a jerk and your coworkers are idiots

There are people who want to be at the top of an organization, for status or money, not because they care about the stated goals of an organization. 

By definition, the larger and more successful the organization is the more these types of people will be attracted to it. 

Also, by definition, these people are willing to do far more to get to the top than people who only want to “be good” at their jobs.

Given that willingness to do anything to get to the top, they have an edge on hiring and promotions and will eventually succeed.

To ensure they don’t lose their position,... (read more)

Gervais Principle

Chapter 4 Part 2

The Lake Wobegon Effect Reconsidered

I began this post with an homage to Garrison Keillor’s “Lake Wobegon,” where “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.”

The delusions of the Clueless (false confidence of the Dunning-Kruger variety, which are maintained through the furious efforts and desperate denials on the part of the deluded individuals themselves).

Loser superiority is generally not based on an outright falsehood. Loser dynamics are largely driven by Lake-Wobegon-effect snow jobs, which obscure pervasive mediocrity. Loser delusions are maintained by groups. You scratch my delusion, I’ll scratch yours. I’ll call you a thoughtful critic if you agree to... (read more)

Gervais Principle

Chapter 4 Part 1

Marxist Office Theory

Marx provides the core idea we need in his famous line, “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.”  

There is a deep truth here. Social clubs of any sort divide the world into an us and a them. We are better than them. Any prospective new member who could raise the average prestige of a club is, by definition, somebody who is too good for that club.

So how do social groups form at all, given Marx’s paradox? 

If your status is clear, and the status of the club is clear (which is, by definition, the average status of all its... (read 515 more words →)

Gervais Principle

Chapter 5

Sociopaths look for ways to systematically claim paternity for successes, and orphan failures.

Hanlon Dodge

The basic mechanism by which Sociopaths transfer blame to the Clueless, while reducing the overall severity of the penalty, is an application of Hanlon’s Razor: never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.  

Because Hanlon’s Razor is often true, it is a believable dodge even when it is not. Coupled with another uniquely human trait, the tendency to link penalties to intentions rather than consequences (eg. first-degree murder vs. vehicular manslaughter), Hanlon’s razor can be used to manufacture predictable risk free outcomes out of fundamentally unpredictable situations.  How? By shifting blame from a locus where... (read 439 more words →)

Gervais Principle

Chapter 1 Part 2

Continued from Part 1

The Gervais Principle is this:  Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly 

• promote over-performing Losers (ie Clueless) into middle-management
• groom under-performing Losers (ie Sociopaths) into upper-management
• leave the average bare-minimum-effort Losers to fend for themselves.

The business wouldn’t survive very long without enough people actually thinking in cold, calculating ways. On the other hand, Sociopaths know that the only way to make an organization capable of survival is to buffer the intense chemistry between the producer-Losers and the leader-Sociopaths with enough Clueless (ie over performing Losers) padding in the middle to mitigate the risks of business. Without it, the company would explode like a nuclear bomb, rather than generate... (read 453 more words →)

The Gervais Principle

Chapter 1 Part 1

Sociopaths contribute creativity and cold-bloodedness and drive decisions that others are too scared or too compassionate to drive. They are the ones capable of exploiting an idea, killing one good idea to concentrate resources on another at maturity, and milking an end-of-life idea through harvest-and-exit market strategies. They enter and exit organizations at will, at any stage, and do whatever it takes to come out on top.

The Clueless serve as a Cat’s Paw for Sociopaths and as a buffer in what would otherwise be a painfully raw master-slave dynamic in a pure Sociopath-Loser organization. They don’t leave the org until they have absolutely no choice. They hang... (read more)

Gervais Principle - the three (6?) different types of people in organizations according to the Gervais Principle.  I think eventually I'll do a full on post on it, but thought I would start with some shortforms to make progress and get any questions/feedback before I do the whole thing