I really enjoyed this when I was younger, around the time it came out. Over time though I came to realize it's way too cynical and reductive to really guide you to any sort of successful outcome.
Do your best to be confident, kind, and engaged and you will run circles around the characters enumerated here, even the "winners".
One of my problems with it is the horrible and overloaded terminology. "I'll call them losers, but I don't mean they're losers". Fine, find a better and less pejorative term, then.
People deserve dignity, even if they are (sometimes forced into) making economic choices you think suboptimal.
Indeed, I find the alternative naming proposed on the DaedTech blog a lot better: opportunists/idealists/pragmatists. Giving up on financial ambition and simply enjoying life is a pragmatic choice for many if not most people.
Agreed. In fact, the 'minimum-effort Losers' at certain booming industries (i.e. tech) are, in my view and arguably somewhat objectively, absolute 'Winners' of capitalism.
Health-preserving work, at least a bit intellectually stimulating, paying so well that you can amass wealth and/or retire early + limited responsibility and no serious legal/economical fallout due to failure
"Losers" in tech have got a great deal.
Edit: to add - _job mobility_ to a level that even the 'Sociopaths' envy
That isn't an actual quote from the article. The article series quite clearly explains that these people are economic losers because they trade their time (just like the clueless and some sociopaths) for a paycheck but have neither the higher floor of the clueless or the higher ceiling of the sociopaths.
If you take article in the spirit of "All models are flawed, but some are useful" (some famous statistician named G.E.P.Box), then it is interesting perspective from which to look at organization.
Unfortunately that's exactly what a sociopath or clueless would say.
I believe in "work hard & be nice to people", but for religious & stoic reasons rather than expectations that it will be a successful strategy in most corporate environments.
You want the _optics_ of working hard and being nice, without being a pushover, and with seeking opportunities to advance yourself. A sociopath is a master manipulator in this regard.
The easiest way to obtain the optics of this, is to actually embody it. (much easier than cultivating sociopathic tendencies) The danger is that you over-nice, and end up a sucker.
The sociopath works because he can appear to be the conscientious achiever without doing the hard part. It's possible, but better to just be the conscientious achiever for your own sake.
Thanks, you put it much more clearly than I did. It's what I was getting at with the confidence part, that you need to know your boundaries and what your goals are, and not being afraid enforce them. You can do this while being kind and will achieve better results because you have friends and allies to work with.
> It's possible, but better to just be the conscientious achiever for your own sake.
I don't think that kind of committment is one concerned with the prospect of failure, and this may be the difference in subjectivity, which seems to be grandparent's point.
If I had to be bucketed into one of these categories it would be the sociopath one. But, I've done it without doing the things described by the author as necessary, and seeing those who have tries to work in that way eventually fail.
How healthy/functional are the institutions you have worked in, though?
I think healthy institutions find and reward the best people, and so this model fails in them. But the author’s assumption is (perhaps accurately) that most companies are in fact dysfunctional. Earlier in my work history I worked at some awful companies where this model rang an awful lot more true.
And I do think that the article is reading too much into the show. While the show has a sense a realism (all shows do), it is a fiction, and many things happen for the sake of comedy or plot.
The primary flaw of the article is that it gives FAR too much agency to the "sociopaths".
Most of the sociopaths are where they are because of randomness, too. The sociopaths often recognize that a situation could benefit them personally so they grab ahold--this is the point where they may stab somebody in the back.
However, after they mount up for the ride, the tiger goes where it wants and they really don't have any control over it. If it goes well, congrats on your promotion. If it goes badly, even with a scapegoat your promotion path is done so start looking for a new job.
So, the "sociopaths" are a product of 8 coin flips that all came up heads--unfortunately they all think they are geniuses.
I'm sure you've seen terrible behavior in corporate environments. I have too.
But I've also seen wonderfully productive, supportive behavior. I've seen leaders who uplift and who succeed by helping those around them. I've learned to pay attention to who I work for, or with, and to support the kind of people who I want to see running things.
It's a grave error to only consider the worst while ignoring the best.
> But I've also seen wonderfully productive, supportive behavior.
Me too, 99% coming from the rank and file, cleaning personnel, etc. A VP wont sacrifice his chances of promotion to help you, and if he has to fire you to get it,he will.
I think I've seen one VP ever take the fall instead of firing an employee, and that was a principal engineer who was the VP's friend. Moral victory- but both the VP and the engineer were fired in the end.
That said, I believe this is an isolated and extremely rare incident.
I think it's clear even by your tone you recognize those aren't great leaders. Are you saying you feel they are -successful- leaders? More so than the kind ones? I think most would view Obama as a more successful leader than Trump; certainly, he won re-election easily.
Obama is a great politician (as in kiss the babies get the votes politician). He is one of the most inconsequential presidents in the last 100 years. Basically nothing happened during his presidency. The status quo was maintained, some trends got worse (inequality, climate record) and a barely functional health plan was put in place, that's it.
But I really wish people understood how difficult it is to get to "nothing happened." Pilots put in hundreds of hours, and the plane landed, so "nothing happened." The 20 hour surgery went well and the person survived, so "nothing happened." Etc. etc.
Trump has had a much bigger impact on America than Obama did... whether that’s good or bad depends on your perspective. If, say, your mother was one of the villagers raped and murdered at Dos Erres in Guatemala, you might feel some catharsis from the hastened demise of the American republic.
Didn't say anything about effectiveness at creating change; Trump could have had that on lock just by pressing the red button, so to speak. I said leader.
Is winning re-election really the metric for a great leader? If anything, an effective leader is going to have more opposition when it comes to re-election. No one is concerned with an ineffective leader, least of all their enemies.
In fact I've never worked in an environment like described in this article. I'm not questioning their existence, I know plenty friends who work(ed) in toxic environments, and sure I've been a bit lucky.
But the whole idea that unavoidably you're either a loser, clueless, or a sociopath just doesn't seem rooted in reality to me. Plenty companies are not set up as toxic exploitation machines.
I think both you and the parent have missed the point.
The word “loser” is not the colloquial use of the term, and there is no “winner” (despite the confusing quotations above). Here it simply means loser in the economic sense — they produce an outsized amount of value for the company. They may be fully aware of this, and be happy and productive. They are simply unwilling or unable to do what’s necessary to climb the corporate ladder. If they have awareness of this dynamic, then they’re also unlikely to be promoted in middle management, since the sociopaths want people that will be loyal to them and support their agenda.
Similarly “clueless” doesn’t mean they are idiots — simply that they don’t have what it takes to be a sociopath, and aren’t aware of how they are being used. In other words, they are thinking exactly like the parent post — that’s exactly the kind of person the sociopath wants to promote to middle management.
Finally, “sociopath” is an exaggeration, and it doesn’t mean these people are terrible humans with no redeeming qualities. It just means that they are focused on their own outcomes above others, and internally may be lacking in the conscience department.
He goes quite deep over the full series and puts them into very rigidly defined boxes with whole sets of behaviors and even specific language and secret communication modes attributed to them.
If you loosen it all back up it's vague enough to be generally applicable.
I love this article and try to share it with whomever I can. It is unrelentingly cynical and skewers all parts of the corporate world, no one escapes being flayed. The insights are very good and the backdrop of an innocuous and very popular TV show makes the distinctions all the more jarring.
The Gervais Principle is a lens one chooses to view things in finer detail.
But like all microscopes, the choice of lenses matter very much. You must know what error is introduced before you choose the lenses.
That said, the Gervais Principle is a really good lens (a hyper-cynical lens); one that many people have not considered before.
I really liked the show for its light-heartedness and it's non-PC oriented comedy (which faded away as seasons went by), but there are also other interesting themes there, such as subtle hints from writers that Michael Scott putting up an act to actually make the most out of employees of Dunder Mifflin.
I'm not sure if there are other episodes, but there's a big hint in an episode in season 4 that Michael is much more astute than he lets on:
During the episode where Michael goes out to do a "survival show" in the woods (ala Bear Grylls). Jim is the temporary manager while Michael is gone, and he tries to combine several staff birthdays which are close together into one big celebration. It backfires terribly.
When Michael returns and Jim expresses his relief, Michael explains that he made the same mistake Jim did once and explains that the decision to celebrate the close birthdays separately is a very deliberate one. He also implies that Jim is very much on the same trajectory as him.
He then makes a "That's what she said" joke randomly, and Jim basically replies "Uh, what?" and Michael explains that he makes dumb jokes often to just break the tension.
It's a pretty lucid moment for an otherwise often opaque character, but does imply that Michael's quirks are a result of his staff and not in spite of them.
That shows he's learned from a few mistakes, and it's well established in show that he was always pretty good at being a bullshitting salesman to close deals for mundane purchases like corporate paper (perhaps before his mind went a bit foggier with age). It doesn't outweigh the 10 times per season his bad choices did damage to the company, morale, or someone's life.
Honestly, that’s pretty out of character for Michael Scott. For a character who otherwise repeatedly makes the same mistakes over and over again, to show even that tiny bit of insight is a pretty big plot twist that maybe he’s not completely the bumbling oaf he lets on.
I’m not saying he’s secretly a Machiavellian genius, but his stupid antics belie what seems to be a pretty high emotional IQ at times (in sales and management, at least).
Yeah, I mean of course that’s a possibility. I looked it up, and apparently Steve Carrell wrote the episode in question. It’s not too wild to imagine that he used the opportunity to present his own character as more than just a bumbling oaf.
But then again, Michael having an inconsistently high emotional IQ is a recurring theme. When he’s in “sales mode”, he’s really good at making an emotional connection with people and making them feel like they’re buying from a friend.
I dunno. It’s an interesting conundrum the series presents and obviously doesn’t dig into too deeply since it’s a sitcom. Michael is sometimes unnaturally attuned to someone’s feelings and other times extremely oblivious to them.
- Whole company going downhill and when Jim as co-manager got nervous about another Michael's "brilliant" idea of distracting people from work, he stuns him and audience with "They need this game. Let them have this stupid little game"
- Another dialogue with Jim implying that "That's what she said" lines are more self-conscious than everybody in the office thinks.
Scranton branch having one of or lone best finance numbers across whole company just makes me think Michael knew along what is he doing. This plot was never expanded in the show for obvious reasons.
Still, it’s definitely not “all an act”. Yes, Michael has a few good moments, but more often than not, he’s doing stupid shit. GPS incident, the management class, etc.
I think these moments are there to show us that Michael tries his best to be a good manager, and that he sometimes does have good ideas.
As for the numbers, I think that’s all thanks to his employees - he just gets carried along for the ride.
Well, it's a show anyway, but in moments I described writers definitely had sth more in mind than just "Michael having a few good moments"
I can agree that if you look at the storyline as a whole, this theory doesn't make much sense, but these little hints here and there are always giving me second thoughts. Goes to show that art, even such low-key one as TV comedy, can really shine when you keep your head open to more interpretations than just the silver-plattered one.
> 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.
^ His argument assumes there is opportunity scarcity. IMO there is opportunity abundance. A well functioning company does not have an "upward-narrowing pyramid" practically speaking, because the pyramid is growing, ostensibly because each team is helping each other grow the company, increasing opportunity for all.
Arguably opportunity scarcity could exist in a Gervaisian sense if you are part of a company being disrupted (e.g. being a paper company in the digital age).
I think the most beneficial concept from this part of the series is the dichotomy between loser talk and sociopath talk, in which loser talk is entirely about jostling for status in a group, whereas sociopath talk is about figuring out how to get what you want out of an interaction and out of life.
Of course, the language can be recast in a more positive light into playing status games vs. wealth slash some other kind of goal-achieving games.
Or recast it again into a personal CBT method to quiet status-related anxieties: is worrying about what Betty thinks of me or my jokes or social gaffes going to make me any happier, richer, or healthier? What would a "sociopath" think? Would they even react to this? Perhaps the answer is "yes", but much more often than not, the answer is "no, it doesn't matter one bit." It's your mind creating demons out of dust.
Argle-bargle. People get promoted for many reasons, and this is even played out in the show. Michael Scott, for being a bullshitter (great in sales), Jan for "looking corporate", David Wallace seemingly for competence, Ryan for credentials, Creed for seniority, Kelly (temporarily) through some diversity push, Andy for lack of a better option, Kathy Bates through marriage, Robert California for being a real pyscho, and Dwight through sheer doggedness.
Hmm, I think the idea is a bit reductionist but given that his definitions stem from those characters I don't think you've chosen great examples.
Ryan, Jan, and later Kelly are definitely "sociopaths" by the article's definition (if not by, well, psychological standards).
Jo (Kathy Bates) straight up says her primary reason for getting married was to attain wealth and power.
David Wallace is seemingly very nice, but the articles explain how he repeatedly sets up "heads i win (and you get a kudos), tails you lose" scenarios. Robert California does this as well, and often in a much more obvious manner.
Michael Scott is his epitome of "clueless", who will never advance past middle management (and we see this play out several times). You can call it the Peter Principle too, if you want. You can throw Andy and Dwight in there too. None of them has the stomach to truly put themselves above everyone else (not even Dwight).
> Dastardly as all this sounds, it is actually pretty efficient, given the inevitability of the MacLeod hierarchy and life cycle.
I suppose there are different prospective models depending on which seasons of the show you focus on. This take seems directly disputed in whatever season showed the sociopaths unable to figure out how Michael's branch could possibly be profitable. That plot arc offers a more scathing critique than the author's model lets on.
In fact, it reminds me a lot like Linus' critique of svn-- the idea of a design that is so perfectly antithetical to any of its stated goals that someone could blindly design a better alternative by merely asking at every turn, "What would svn not do?"
The Office seems to take the company (and any triangle it seems to fit) as similarly perfectly flawed. Consequently, Michael's chronic/comic incompetency reverses a critical mass of the company's strategies for the branch to succeed.
Seeing as it's called the "Gervais Principle," I'm 100% positive this was written primarily for David Breen and not Michael Scott. Which I'd highly recommend watching the british office to get an understanding of what is so different. The american office is like the the big bang theory and the british office is like silicon valley.
You might want to ratchet down that percentage for your future speculation:
> I’ll be basing this entire article on the American version of the show, which is more fully developed than the original British version, though the original is perhaps more satisfyingly bleak.
Do your best to be confident, kind, and engaged and you will run circles around the characters enumerated here, even the "winners".