https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-gervais-pri...
The biggest takeaway for me is that you shouldn't expect to succeed as a manager by meeting (or exceeding) KPIs. It's about as effective as being a "nice guy" and expecting intimacy in return.
The KPIs are there for assigning blame, not for identifying key personnel. You can game them to increase your compensation if you are already doing something that an even bigger manager finds useful and important. Conversely, you can get away with half-assing every official performance indicator as long as you keep delivering the real thing.
He does say in section (I):
> I was particularly told to “take it as literally as possible”
I see some correlation here to hesitancy in adopting LLMs for coding.
"If we could convince [any] Sociopath that we were all Losers, we might be able to entice them into spilling their secrets as 'Straighttalk'. (Arguably that's what this book is..)"
On one hand Rao doesn't say much about Gametalk (he basically defers to Eric Berne) which is the Loser's sociolect and should well be our default.
On the other, Rao much more optimistic than Orwell, who declared doublespeak the lingua franca?
If time travel were possible, one of the first things I'd do is introduce Orwell to the 'algospeak' of today. This would do two things, firstly it'd show him a decent piece of evidence that Newspeak isn't as effective a tool for limiting human thought as he believed, and secondly he'd have to write another version of Politics and the English Language aimed at the language sins of attention economy era social media.
The problem was to my existential horror: i couldn’t use this knowledge to get anywhere beyond clueless. Because super large western organizations either purposefully hide information or are full of stupidity so much that they can’t share it.
I never could climb to any kind of safety —- until I realized that was the point. There is no safety. You only climb if you recognize death is inevitable, leaving those who want safety behind.
So now that I’m further up: Peter Turchins elite over production is my new nightmare
Money is nice, dont get me wrong, but to value the climbing itself?
Usually resulting in living as if you worked a menial job not having a family and essentially working hard to not achieve anything. Then mostly living the rest of your life consuming your own smugness.
The Lamborgini Urus is a sign of the apocalypse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6_Z0yGwtx0
My own losing trap, which I think is common, is to try to periodically make sense of the organization and map a logical path forward for myself. This never works. My career progress in the organization has actually come about through sheer accident and/or lucky association.
Previous discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
1. business people sold themselves as the best to manage companies and took over companies (just like lawyers do in governments), changing the norm from decades ago when it was more likely for engineers to run companies than some kind of McKinsey guy
2. but they have no idea besides business/money metrics so they quickly become overwhelmed and decide based on who makes the most compelling argument ("don't bring me more problems, give me solutions")
3. sociopaths exploit this by telling the execs what they want to hear
4. only after a while, after significant investment of resources in the decisions/projects proposed by the sociopaths it comes up to light it's complete nonsense
5. the sociopaths are aware of this, so they usually pivot before SHTF or they even exploit the situation to ask for more to "fix" the problems
6. the execs who backed the sociopaths want to cover their own asses so they hide the problems from higher ups for as long as possible (CEO, board, investors, shareholders, clients, authorities, public)
7. competent people are pulled out of productive work and thrown to solve impossible or even contradicting situations; some burn out, some leave, and the ones who stay are often stained forever like they were the cause of the problem
Sometimes the sociopaths are external consulting companies or companies offering some magic huge system that they promise will solve all the problems.
Sociopaths exploit information asymmetry.
Classic: https://web.archive.org/web/20051013062258/http://www.kuro5h...
"Quiet" people who know when to speak absolutely rise above anyone else, in a professional setting, in my experience.
If you don't say something when you see something is wrong, never say anything about it (at all). Otherwise you're asking for trouble later when the shit eventually hits the fan. "You knew and didn't say anything‽"
Even if someone gets upset at you for speaking up, that's still a better situation than being blamed later when the real finger pointing occurs.
"Don't look at me! I warned about this!" is a very real get-out-of-jail-free card in medium to large organizations. Especially if you have your objections in writing (save all emails!).
As a great example: At my work, the company made a piss poor decision to buy an (expensive) enterprise product that I warned would not work to solve the problem it was being purchased to solve. I warned them ahead of time that it wouldn't work. Then I warned them in the middle of the project and again, at implementation time.
When it didn't work, management came down HARD on everyone. In the middle of the finger pointing meeting I pulled up my emails which were sent to the people trying to point the proverbial finger and the meeting was over. Just like that! I saved the whole team with the simple act of voicing my objections in writing at every stage of the project.
If I didn't do that I have no doubt that some scapegoat would've been fired. Instead, no one got fired (sadly, because the normal rules of incompetence don't apply to the clueless/management layer, haha).
Unfortunately, to this day management never takes my offers of, "instead of purchasing this terrible 'enterprise' solution for millions of dollars, give ME that money and I'll produce a solution that's better in every way. I'll even have it up and running faster than we could requisition and install the product!"
Many times and in many orgs, the window to speak up opens too seldomly and it's barely cracked open...
Now it’s noise and screaming. You can speak up, result will be the same as if you would do that in the forest. Loud bullshiters will be promoted. Your technical opinion with properly perceived problems will be discarded as stupid. Welcome in the age of noise. And it also reflects in the current German economy and probably politics too.
If they speak up their illusions might be shattered!
Also I don't think either is true in general, but it is partially true in fundamentally social regimes like sales an bureaucracy where mother nature isn't involved so truth isn't a major factor in success.
I think critics use the word "moron" too often to mean "someone whose intelligence is different from mine, and doesn't have a respect for truth as a universal principle". Ladder climbing "sociopaths" apply their intelligence to social puzzles that many engineers and scientists ignore or don't understand. And some people are smart but also bullies, and dominate people who might be smarter. That's different from being a dumb bully.
Verwirrung Season of Chaos January 1-March 14
Zweitracht Season of Discord March 15-May 26
Unordnung Season of Confusion May 27-August 7
Beamtenherrschaft Season of Bureaucracy August 8-October 19
Grummet Season of Aftermath October 20-December 31
From the book Illuminatus!
Accurate translations are:
Verwirrung = Confusion
Zwietracht = Discord
You swapped i and e; somehow English speakders do this to German words all of the time. The 'ie' in here is a long 'i'.
Zweitracht on the other hand would mean a "double traditional costume", if that word existed (it does exist in theory, it is just then number two [Zwei] and the noun for a traditional costume [Tracht] strung together; would be a great name for a German shop that sells used/pre-owned traditional costumes btw.)
Unordnung = Clutter
Beamtenherrschaft = Rule of the public servant class
Grummet = Second hay harvest
Chaos is the opposite of order and the opposite of Ordnung is Unordnung
They invest most, they care about made up goals nobody else cares about, they play by rules everyone else thinks are dumb, they feel loyal to a company that doesn't love them back, and because they are more invested in the company, they are the ones who feel the loss the most when the sociopaths pull the rug.
I think it's actually the Losers who have it better: they are simply not invested enough, they are replaceable but also find their place in other companies, and in any case, failure affects us-- I mean, them -- less simply because they are not invested as much and they never felt any loyalty.
"Loser" is a loaded term because it sounds like the cultural, lowercase loser ("so and so is such a loser!") but it actually means "loser in the game of maximum capitalist profit and power". But if you're not really playing that game, being a loser at it isn't so bad.
And it likely applies to a ton of churches out there, especially megachurches, where you walk in to the lobby and see leadership books by their star CEO aka pastor about leadership or life lessons or whatever. But those megachurches churn through employees until they find just enough psychopaths (aka executive pastors) willing to be assholes for God, plenty of clueless who are happy to serve as that middle management, and then those who are okay with being loyal and doing just enough week to week for a paycheck.
I've seen it all too often.
Check out the podcast Bodies Behind the Bus if you want a glimpse about what happens to those who actually call some of those megachurches to live into what they say - like actually caring for their neighbors.
I’ve tried to limit myself to only the best and most practical books about leadership that didn’t start corporate speak, and I doubt Gervais Principle would be quoted or used in work conversation, so it’s perfect.
All my life I was bad at being a loser, somehow I never really felt I fit in. I thought this was because of psychopathic tendencies or something. However, after reading this I realized there was another option and I was just clueless.
Suggested starter essay: https://meltingasphalt.com/personality-the-body-in-society/
Didn't make me less clueless, I think...
In that sense, the real “governance mechanism” isn’t internal management at all but the external Darwinian churn of the market.
1. Sociopaths don't recruit. They build fiefdoms and leverage social ties. How many times have you seen a random guy making minimum wage become senior management? Almost never. The exception to this is people who are hired to be in the running for senior management who are moved all over the company at a fast pace to get the lay of the land.
2. Losers are sociopaths who do not have the birthright to be sociopaths. Put the other way around, sociopaths are losers born into valuable social ties. Their natures are the same. Power corrupts. Most people never learn what they become with power. The clueless are the strange ones, the glue that holds everyone together and keeps the lights on.
3. As the author says, gametalk is obtuse discussion distinguished by the stakes involved. That is normal human social patterns, only distinguished by the stakes. If direct, straightforward discussion was the norm, we wouldn't need to use adjectives for it. The clueless are once again the outliers of the organization. The stakes and who gets to use them are the dividing line once again.
It's hard to think that most people are so selfish they would throw their group and others under the bus for benefits, but if you look for it, you will see it everywhere. Most people do not have the ability to exercise enough power to make it obvious.
Think about Resume Driven Development. Half of it is clueless people genuinely excited for Brand New Thing, but what about the rest? They know that in five years, companies will demand ten years of experience in Brand New Thing. So what do they do? They push for Brand New Thing wherever they can. This lets them accumulate leverage for their next job. Who does this hurt? Their company and everyone who has to deal with their Ball of Mud when they leave. This is the moral equivalent of some senior manager taking short-term gains at long-term loss to grab a fat bonus and fail upwards into another company.
I really enjoyed the series, but it has the same problems as other realpolitik subjects. Clueless will grab onto it thinking they can become the next Alexander the Great or Jeff Bezos and make a fool of themselves. The essential ingredients are never spoken out loud, and topics like this are always gross oversimplifications by their very nature.
There are at least four kinds of underlings. Most middle managers are a combination. First you have the Douchebags, people who traded their morals for money. Second you have the Punching Bags, mercenaries whose moral code is akin to the mafia. Third there are Teabags, unintelligent Dunning Krueger types who are the shrill mouthpieces of the TP. Fourth you have Poop Bags, people who clean up after everyone else.
Some people are promoted without reaching their level of incompetence. Some leaders are actually empathetic. Some middle managers are effective. And some low-level grunts are consciously and happily both productive and exploited without desire for more. Granted, they're in the minority, but they do exist. I would rather there be language to describe and venerate these people, than to paint the whole world with a pessimistic brush.
He argues that the 'sociopath class' of social-climbing nihilists map 1:1 onto the leaderships of large organizations but it's rare in the real world. Usually there are people of all levels of naiveté and nihilism at all ranks of organizations, with naive true believers mixing with nihilists at the top, the middle and the bottom fairly equally, because the world has too much churn to settle into the kind of density-separation equilibrium he describes.
Interesting is also that Michael does make a really good arc from season one to when he leaves. He remains clueless, or rather he it dawns on him he does not want to become like Ryan or David (the articles sociopath). Like he says in a later season “Business is about people.”
It is also useful because it shows an old adage: people get promoted to their level of incompetence. Michael is actually an excellent salesman. He's a bad manager. He was promoted to branch manager because he was good at a different job.
This is just like when a really good engineer is promoted and becomes a bad manager.
Wouldn't that make them even bigger ~losers~ Clueless?
The ~losers~ Clueless are strictly those who put in more effort than they get in return but who cannot see it!
Putting in +25% extra into their job for a 5% promotion, for example.
Putting in effort for anything other than money is in the companies interest - they want people to be happy with vibes-as-compensation instead of money-as-compensation!
---------------
EDIT: I meant to say Clueless, not "losers".
I think those would be the losers who get promoted to clueless, at least in this metaphor. The losers who aren't clueless are putting in the bare minimum work that doesn't get them fired. If they overperform, they (according to the theory) get promoted.
I fully agree this nasty "vibes-as-compensation" bullshit, "we're all a family", etc, is in the interest of the top leadership. The sociopaths, if you will.
The malaise afflicting Gen Z is more- secular- than cultural, I fear. The endpoint of economic trends.
The hippies largely were Boomers, not their children.
VR used the British Office as an analogy, Alex Danco used the American Office and I tried to showcase the German Office.
https://www.artlapinsch.com/stromberg/
Four years on and not much has changed from my analysis. Unfortunately.
Brent (Gervais) is neither a sociopath nor the top dog he thinks he is, he's a middle manager who it's implied was legitimately good at sales, but is not at all good at the role he's been promoted into because it's a completely different one.
The actual upper management, sociopathic or not, are certainly not scouring the underlings for underperforming sociopaths phoning it in to promote (imagine Keith being promoted!), and are actually more interested in making them redundant to make efficiency savings. We don't see senior management at all, they don't see most of the employees at all and they clearly don't have much idea what's going on, initially considering promoting Brent (because he applies for it and can bluff his way through an interview) but then in the second season bringing in Neil to oversee him and get rid of him (because they've started paying attention). Neil is obviously more socially adept which is probably why he's been promoted higher at a younger age, but he also appears to be actually good at his job. On the other hand, Gareth whose career appears to have topped out at assistant to the Regional Manager, ends up getting Brent's middle management job though he has zero social skills and actually liked the guy whose seat he takes, because he wants it, he grafts and he's there. Most of the others in the office neither work particularly hard nor particularly care for seeking promotion. And it's a paper company, they don't exactly have many ways to identify high performers anyway and the really ambitious and talented people are elsewhere.
(We don't see the people at the top at all, but they probably went to the right school, started in middle management somewhere else and hopped jobs adding bullet points of performance they can claim credit for to their CV until they got C-suite titles and compensation)
I think in this hierarchy Brent is supposed to be Clueless rather than Sociopath.
I agree it doesn't 100% match the characters.
By the way, I like Steve Carell but the British show was much better than the US one.
the part near the end discussing the loser's realization and process of transitioning into sociopath (or ending up "worse" than before) reminded me of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. it's been over a decade since i read it but i think the underlying idea is fairly similar to that process.
It made me recognize how many times I, or people I know, was the weakest link in the chain, the clueless.
So have been the many examples of power talk and the importance of information.
Sociologists focus on tone, Rao focuses on the content.
In The Gervais Principle information is a currency and treated as negotiation leverage. You never give it for free, unless strictly in the boundaries of your job. Thus, under this lens, you collect as much information and never give it away for free.
Suppose you're a software engineer and a service you work on is slow.
There's two ways you can go about it:
"Our API has a 300ms+ latency, I have some ideas on how to fix it" -> giving information, and work for free. You're in the loser/clueless category.
Which of those depends on your awareness: are you aware of the political game and ignore it and focus on the craft? Loser. Are you not aware of the political game and try to do "what's best for the team/company"? You're clueless.
Then there's the sociopath's version:
"We may have a performance issues affecting reliability. Before we go deeper, we should decide who owns performance optimization."
This is power talk. Even if you don't own the performance optimization you still:
- communicated that you hold information others don't
- you're setting the tone and direction of the meeting
At this point somebody may raise the point of "which performance issues?" and here the hard part begins, how do you navigate and play the game? Are you prepared to motivate why ownership comes before information?
In the end, probably the best way to learn power talk in the context of the Gervais principle is to experiment, observe and study. Because no other sociologists has focused on it with Rao's angle.
The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41214180 - Aug 2024 (173 comments)
The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33298158 - Oct 2022 (149 comments)
The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25486869 - Dec 2020 (60 comments)
The Gervais Principle III: The Curse of Development - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1267202 - April 2010 (27 comments)
The Gervais Principle II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=937541 - Nov 2009 (32 comments)
The Gervais Principle, or The Office According to "The Office" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881296 - Oct 2009 (63 comments)
This one got me interested. Can you elaborate? It is a show, but there is absolutely plenty of evidence within the show to support that claim.
There was plenty of evidence that Jan was a sociopath, or Ryan (obviously), but David had quite literally 0 sociopathic tendencies. Plus, this author said something about how David (and Jan) were both 'clueless' about Michael's incompetence, so it isn't like you can argue that David knew he was incompetent but tried to get him promoted to corporate anyway (which would obviously have been manipulative, although that alone wouldn't make him a sociopath).
When Dwight did random crazy shit, like set a fire in the office to do fire safety awareness day, David told him straight up that he couldn't do that and why. At no time did David display a lack of social skills, lack of empathy, or antisocial behaviour (except for a bit after he gets fired and prior to starting up Suck It). The most you could probably say there is that when Michael and Holly were forced apart (Holly back to Nashua), David was a bit muted - but even then, he tried to send Michael on a vacation (which got Michael laid in the end), even though the episode ends with Michael raging at David.
I'm happy to hear what the 'plenty of evidence' is.
