Reading Notes

The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According To “The Office”

  • The Office is a fully realized theory of management
  • Cornerstone: The Gervais Principle
  • Based upon Hugh MacLeod’s company hierarchy company hierarchy
  • The only management works compatible with the Gervais Principle are The Organization Man, by William H. Whyte and Images of Organization, by Gareth Morgan
  • From the Whyte School to the Gervais Principle
    • Organizations don’t suffer from pathologies, they are inherently pathological constructs
    • Idealized organizations are perfectly pathological
    • Instead of relentlessly pushing towards an ideal organization, do the bare minimum of organizing, then stop
    • Let individual Darwninian competition take over from there
    • This results in the organizational hierarchy above
    • 3 types of people in organization:
      • Sociopaths - Darwinian/Protestant will-to-power
        • Drive an organization to function despite itself
      • Clueless - The Organization Man, evolved
      • Losers
        • Not social losers
        • People who have given up capitalist striving for a steady paycheck
    • When he wrote The Organization Man, whyte was despairing that the Clueless were about to secure a permanent victory over the Sociopaths
      • Whyte admired Sociopaths for making organizations effective despite themselves
    • Sociopaths win in the end, though, but not by reforming the corporate hierarchy
    • Create a meta-culture of brutal corporate Darwinism
      • Leveraged buy-outs
      • Job-hopping
      • “Disruption”
      • Start-up ecosystem
    • By doing so, Sociopaths turn the Organization Man into the Clueless
    • Don’t bother trying to reform organizations that have lost touch with reality - just scrap them and salvage the pieces

    • MacLeod Life Cycle:

      corporate lifecycle

      • Sociopath with an idea recruits just enough Losers to start off the cycle
      • Organization requires a layer of Clueless to buffer Losers from Sociopath power-politics
      • Eventually, as the idea hits diminishing returns, Sociopaths and Losers emigrate, leaving the organization dominated by Clueless
        • This causes the organization to lose touch with reality
      • Eventually the organization is killed off by meta-culture
    • The 3 kinds of people in a corporate organization
      • Loser:
        • Loser in the economic sense, only
        • Trade freedom for paycheck
        • Give up long-term economic liberty for short-term economic stability
        • Like to feel good about their lives
        • Happiness seekers
        • Enter and exit firms reactively in response to meta-trends
        • Loyalty to individuals, but no loyalty to the firm as a whole
      • Sociopath
        • Enter and exit firms at will at any stage
        • Do whatever it takes to come out on top
        • Contribute creativity in early stages
        • Contribute neurotic leadership in mid stages
        • Contribute cold-heartedness in late stages
        • Exploit ideas for growth in early stages
        • Kill good ideas to concentrate resources on proven winners in mid-stages
        • Milk end-of-life ideas through harvest and exit strategies in late stages
      • Clueless
        • Lack competence to freely circulate throughout the economy
        • Build up a perverse sense of loyalty to the firm, even when it’s clear that the firm has no loyalty to them
        • Hang on as long as possible, even when sociopaths and losers have left
  • The Gervais Principle and its consequences
    • The Gervais Principle: Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowing promote over-performing Losers into middle-management, where they become Clueless, groom enlightened under-performing Losers into Sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum effort Losers to fend for themselves
    • The Gervais Principle superficially looks like the Peter Principle (people get promoted to their level of incompetence)
      • However, the Peter Principle doesn’t make any sense, empirically
        • It’s not possible for everyone to be promoted in a narrowing pyramid
        • If Sociopaths are promoting people beyond their level of competence under conditions of scarcity of opportunity, then there must be a reason
    • Gervais Prinicple also has a superficial resemblance to the Dilbert Principle
      • Dilbert Principle: Organizations promote incompetents into middle management to limit the damage they’re able to do
      • Gervais Principle predicts the exact opposite: organization promote over-performers into middle management
      • Leave minimum-effort performers alone
      • Certain enlightened incompetents get fast-tracked to the executive level
      • Unenlightened incompetents get fired
  • The career of the Clueless
    • Example: reorg and branch merger in The Office
    • Michael Scott’s (Sociopath) counterpart at another branch engineers a merger between the Scranton and Stamford branches
    • Takes advantage of increased status and jumps ship to an executive position with a competitor
    • Sociopath executives proceed with merger even though it makes no sense
    • Put Michael in charge of the combined branch while they maneuver away from consequences - leave Michael to take the fall
    • Promoting over-performing Losers into Clueless allows Sociopaths to have plausible deniability around failures
  • The career of the Sociopath
    • Ryan, the intern
    • Unlike the Loser, the Sociopath deliberately underperforms
    • Underperform in order to free up energy for an upward exit
    • Calculated risk that he will be promoted before he is fired
  • The career of the Loser
    • Stanley, the warehouse worker
    • Not marked for either Sociopath or Clueless
    • Make the best of a bad situation
    • Do the minimum necessary to not get fired
  • The emergence of the MacLeod hierarchy
    • The only way to make an organization function is to buffer the producers (the Losers) from the Sociopath machinations that give the organization direction
    • The best way to accomplish this is with a layer of Clueless
    • However, you need to somehow keep drawing Sociopaths up into the top ranks
      • Can’t use standard promotion mechanisms, because those are are designed to turn Losers into Clueless
      • Standard promotion mechanism will get you into middle management, but never executive management
    • Sociopaths are “fast-tracked” to the top using mechanisms that are not clearly discernible to Losers and Clueless
  • The organization as psychic prison
    • Organization seen as a form of Plato’s cave
    • Divides people into those who can see the true functioning of the organization and those who cannot
      • Clueless and over-performing Losers - don’t understand organization’s true (pathological) nature
      • Rationally checked-out losers - see organization’s true nature and try to escape it
      • Sociopaths - aware of organization’s true nature and try to exploit it
    • The Office is interested in the subjective nature of being Clueless
      • Clueless don’t have to explain failure, they have to explain success
      • Explain success by choosing to believe in the organization’s processes, even when those processes are dysfunctional
      • Clueless have to reconcile the appearance of power with their actual powerlessness
      • Resort to manipulation of false validation

The Gervais Principle II: PostureTalk, PowerTalk, BabyTalk, and GameTalk

  • In order to influence position within organization, need to recognize 4 different kinds of speech
    • PostureTalk
    • PowerTalk
    • BabyTalk
    • GameTalk
  • The calculus of organizational dynamics
    • The Gervais Principle operates at the tempo of promotions, demotions, hirings and firings
    • However the bulk of organizational life plays out one conversation at a time
    • 4 unique languages among 3 groups
      • PowerTalk: In-group language among sociopaths
      • PostureTalk: Language spoken by Clueless to everyone (Clueless don’t recognize themselves as a separate group)
      • BabyTalk: Language spoken by Losers and Sociopaths to Clueless
      • GameTalk: What Losers speak among themselves
        • GameTalk is covered by Transactional Analysis
      • Sociopaths and Losers rarely talk to one another directly (the entire role of the Clueless is to buffer this interaction), but when they do, it’s in an ordinary utilitarian language that doesn’t attempt to hide the status disparity between the two individuals (StraightTalk)
  • The elements of PowerTalk
    • All about layered meaning
    • Only surface level meaning is truly comprehensible to Clueless
    • Maintain plausible deniability while exchanging useful information
    • Clueless can’t recognize PowerTalk
    • Losers can recognize and partially understand PowerTalk but can’t speak it
  • The characteristics of PowerTalk
    • The distinguishing characteristic of PowerTalk is that the relative status of the two speakers shifts with every word uttered
    • When Clueless or Losers talk to one another, status shifts don’t happen or happen only accidentally
    • The only way you can speak PowerTalk is with “table stakes”
      • Usually information about reality that’s not possessed by the other party
      • PowerTalk is all about trading reality-information for status
    • Myth: Sociopaths engage in PowerTalk only in public
      • Reality: Sociopaths are even more careful with one another than they are with Clueless or Losers
      • For Sociopaths, situations of conflict-of-interest and moral hazard are the norm
      • Sociopaths will always stick to the letter of the law while seeking to undermine its intent
  • How not to learn PowerTalk: Toy Guns and Treacle
    • Toy Guns: empty machismo
      • Formulaic tactics - everybody, especially Sociopaths, knows about them and can deflect them
      • Not situational - try to apply same tactics in dissimilar situations
    • Treacle - vocabulary drawn from win-win/play-nice frameworks used to try to deflect criticism
      • Using this against a Sociopath is like asking them to take advantage of you
  • Why can’t you learn PowerTalk from a book?
    • Need to evaluate power relations and interests of other parties before deciding which tactic to use
    • Tactics only make sense in the context of a narrative
    • PowerTalk is the art of of making decisions about what verbal tactics to use, when and with what - what are you risking
      • If you’re not risking anything, you’re not engaging in PowerTalk
  • The art of PowerTalk
    • The only way to get good at PowerTalk is to engage in real PowerTalk with Sociopaths, and risk power or wealth
    • Yes, you will lose at first, but you’ll quickly learn how to negotiate
    • There are couple of key skills that can help:
      • Storytelling
      • Maintaining control of conversational tempo

Morality Compassion and the Sociopath

  • The word “Sociopath”
    • A Sociopath is anyone who emobdies the will-to-power, both for good and for ill
    • Driven by unsentimental observation of external realities, no matter how unpleasant that may be
    • Use of information acquired from direct observation in skilled ways
    • Distrust of subsuming communities and groups - personal morality
    • Does not seek approval or justification of their private morality from the group
    • Demonization of Sociopaths by Clueless and Losers comes from demonizing tendencies of group morality
  • The morality of Clueless and Losers
    • The opposite of a good Sociopath is the “evil Clueless”
      • Petty bureaucrats
      • Someone who follows orders, even when those orders mean that they should do something terrible
    • Losers go evil in the “apathetic bystander” mode
    • Clueless and losers externalize their morality into a collective code
    • This code is almost always the personal morality of a charismatic Sociopath
    • Believing in organized religion is incompatible with being a Sociopath
    • Sociopath evil isn’t necessarily the worst form of evil
      • Clueless can amplify evil from a local to a global phenomenon
      • Losers can entrench an evil group culture through inacation
      • What’s more scary? The evil Sociopath or the army of Clueless and Losers he or she inspires?
  • Compassion, Sociopathy and Reluctant Messiahs
    • Sociopaths can be compassionate
    • Sociopath mistrust extends only to groups - capable of feeling empathy and compassion for individuals
    • Sociopath compassion is limited by two factors
      • Distrust of groups - don’t what to contribute to large-scale organized compassion
      • Firm grounding in reality - allows them to see that not all the consequences of an act that feels good are good
    • Sociopaths prefer small-scale individual kindnesses to large-scale save-the-world efforts
    • When sociopaths do engage in large-scale altruism, it tends to look like the Gates Foundation
      • Distrust of groups extends to groups inspired by oneself
      • Smartest sociopaths try to engineer doubt and checks and balances into their organizations
    • Clueless are not capable of compassion unless they strongly identify with the person
    • Losers engage in compassionate actions that make them feel good
    • Not everything that Losers/Clueless do must fail
      • Entirely possible to abdicate individual morality in favor of a good group morality
      • However, group morality is invented and promulgated by Sociopaths
  • Why Am I Doing This
    • Venkatesh wants more Sociopaths
    • More people taking indvidual responsibility is a good thing
    • Allegory with eating fruit of knowledge and awakening into enlightenment

The Gervais Principle III: The Curse of Development

  • The Basic Prediction Problem
    • Up to a point, those who are less psychologically developed will prevail against those who are more developed
    • 4 major factors driving social interaction
      • Situational randomness (luck)
      • Situational information distribution (who knows what, when)
      • Interaction history (psychological debt and relative status)
      • Level of psychological development
  • The curse of development
    • Depth of transaction is limited by the shallower party
    • If a situational-developmental gap between two people is small enough, the more evolved person will systematically lose more often than he or she wins
  • Arrested development and well-adjustedness
    • People are born clueless and clue-in through fits and starts
    • Eventually people exhaust their capacity for real change
    • Society forces all “normal” people through the early stages of development, regardless of their mastery
    • Then, between the ages of 18 and 21, you’re labeled a “well-adjusted adult” and left to your own devices
    • Well-adjustedness - degree to which worldview is socially acceptable and appropriate for a given environment
    • Mental health industry promotes well-adjustedness rather than continuing development
    • Well-adjustedness is measured by gauging whether your reaction is appropriate for the situation
  • The three laws of arrested development
    • Your development is arrested by your strengths, not your weaknesses
    • Arrested development behavior is caused by a strength-based addiction
    • The mediocre develop faster than the talented or untalented
    • Clueless, Losers and Sociopaths correspond to different patterns of arrested development
      • Clueless distort reality
      • Losers distort rewards and penalties
      • Sociopaths distort the metaphysics of human life
  • The Curse Revisited, The Lettuce Explained
    • Why does the more developed person lose?
      • Less developed person does not know what he or she does not know
      • More developed person’s knowledge is fresh and not yet ingrained as second nature
      • To win, the more developed person has to persuade the less developed person without first reversing the status relationship that is informed by confidence
    • It is always difficult for a student to teach a teacher, even if the student is more highly advanced in a particular area
  • Reality distortion by Clueless
    • The Clueless in The Office represent three levels of reality distortion
      • I am OK if I receive praise from a parent (early childhood, Michael)
      • I am OK if I receive praise from non-parent authority figures (pre-adolescence, Dwight)
      • I am OK if I receive praise from peers (adolescence, Andy)
    • The three levels are close enough that the curse of development kicks in and the most developed person, Andy, has the lowest status
    • Michael, the child
      • Michael’s mind is a library of mappings between stituations, canned phrases, and actions
      • The vast majority of the time, the purpose of Michael’s reactions is to disrupt, derail and get people paying attention to him
      • The only way to deal with it is to calmly ignore the disruption and move on
      • Why is Michael’s inability to generate original thought a symbol of his cluelessness?
        • Delusions are closed logical schemes
        • Reality is manipulated to serve a fixed narrative
        • To manufacture reality, you have to open yourself up
      • Michael divides people into two categories
        • People who he should admire
        • People who should admire him
    • Dwight, the pre-teen
      • Dwight’s preferred environment has formal rules and graded evaluations
      • Everything worth learning is teachable, according to Dwight
      • Gets lost in points and rules
      • There has to be a master plan, and Dwight is shocked and hurt when there isn’t
    • Andy, the adolescent
      • Andy is like the un-cool kid angling for a spot at the cool-kids table
      • Seeks to join groups for the sake of being in a group
  • Clueless - Clueless interactions
    • Dwight applies to Cornell
    • Andy seeks to block Dwight
    • Neither Andy nor Dwight execute anything that can be described as a strategy
    • Instead of strategic thinking, they both just try to instinctively block each other by making fun of what each perceives as a moral flaw in the other
  • The Clueless economy
    • The language of winning and losing is only consequential when a Sociopath is involved
    • Transactions occur in Clueless economy, but they take place in a worthless currency that does not alter social status

The Gervais Principle IV: Wonderful Human Beings

  • Marxist Office Theory
    • Not Karl Marx, Groucho Marx
    • “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member”
    • Social clubs and groups divide the world into “us” and “them”
    • Any prospective member who can raise the average prestige of the group is “too good” for the group, and is therefore not incentivized to join
    • Any prospective member who can lower the average prestige of the group is “not good enough” for the group, and the group is therefore not incetivized to let them in
    • So how do social groups form at all?
    • Status illegibility
      • The illegibility of status of any group member is proportional to their distance from the edges of the group
      • The stability of the membership of any member is proportional the illegibility of his or her status
    • In any group, it’s easier to identify the highest status person (the alpha), and the lowest status person (the omega) than it is to identify the status of the people in between
    • The alpha and the omega are weakly attached, while the people in the middle are more strongly attached
    • In practice, you join groups when you know that your status is higher than the omega, but lower than the alpha
    • Willingness to stick with group depends on illegibility of your own status
      • If events conspire to make status more legible, stabilizing forces kick in to restore illegibility
      • If stabilizing forces cannot restore status illegibility, the group dissolves
    • Legible limit points (alpha and omega) are necessary to allow new members to judge whether they’d fit in or not
      • Have the side-effect of allowing sociopaths to value the social capital represented by the group
    • Social groups grow at the illegible middle and leak at the legible edges
    • Group members resist being drawn into games and situations that would make their status legible
  • The Lake Wobegon Effect Reconsidered
    • Unlike Clueless delusions that are maintained by individuals, Loser delusions are maintained by groups
    • Individuals are judged by unique life scripts that make it difficult or impossible to judge relative statuses
      • “I’m good at art, but you’re good at cooking”
      • Everyone is above average in a different way
    • Social dynamics are about maintaining balance between status uncertainty and securing resources (sex, money, power)
  • Joining and leaving groups
    • The status illegibility effect is recursive and applies to subgroups of a larger group as well as to individuals
    • Easy to identify the highest and lowest ranking subgroup
    • Difficult to come up with a rank-ordering of subgroups
    • Group membership is obtained by providing proof of status illegibility
      • You have to have status, but not too much status
      • You have to be willing to obfuscate your status so that the others don’t exactly know how high or low status you really are
        • Participation in group games
        • Conforming to group norms re: speech, dress, etc
    • If the alpha or omega leaves the group, the new alpha/omega is decided at that time, not before
    • Group legibility is controlled by:
      • Pulling individuals up or down through games
      • The adoption or abandonment of specific games
      • The formation and break-up of sub-groups
    • Groups must remain fluid to be functional
      • If status becomes too legible, group is destroyed by status competition
      • If status becomes too illegible, group loses its ability to provide social capital - group turns into ritual
  • Social proof and social capital
    • All game-structured social dynamics are based on skills
    • Since they are based on skills, they can create value
    • Value accumulates as social capital
    • Social skill is behavior whose effectiveness is determined by group reactions
    • Social skills are information skills - effect is produced in others’ minds
    • Value of skill dependent on social proof - positive effect on others
    • Social skills produce social truth hypotheses
    • Social truth hypotheses are validated by group approval or invalidated through group disapproval
    • If a social truth hypothesis is validated, it becomes part of the group’s social capital
    • Social skills can rest on a foundation of objective skill, but it is the group’s reaction to the skill that determines the its value
      • Social skill = objective skill + timing + relevance to the group
    • Humor as a social skill
      • Humor attempts to raise or lower the status of individuals with defined roles and a structurally predictable script (e.g. jokes should have punchlines)
      • 3 roles: jokester, victim and audience
        • Victim may or may not be present
        • Victim may be the same as jokester, in the case of self-deprecating humor
      • Clueless (two-person) humor
        • Joke has to be about the two people present (can’t make jokes at the expense of an absent third party)
        • Can only result in non-adversarial self-deprecation or pointless one-upmanship
        • In neither case does status change
      • Sociopath (one-person) humor
        • Jokester and audience are same
        • Sociopath makes joke at someone else’s expense for private benefit
        • Pushing psychological buttons because it’s fun
        • No social capital gained, since there’s no external audience to grant social capital
      • Loser (group) humor
        • Smallest group size: 3
        • Third person breaks Clueless humor stalemate
        • How does this humor generate status changes?
          • A makes a joke at the expense of B in the presence of C
          • If C laughs at the joke, then A gains social capital
          • If C disapproves of the joke, then B gains social capital
          • If there is no meaningful reaction, then no social capital is generated
  • Round and Round and Up and Down
    • Among Clueless and Sociopaths, humor and other social games do not change social status
    • Clueless operate in fixed social hierarchies
    • Sociopaths base status on negotiating ability rather than relative position in a group
    • Among Losers, group status is real
    • Social status determined by social capital
    • Social capital created and allocated by in-group games
    • When the victim is an out-group, there is a net inflow of social capital
    • Redistribtion of social capital occurs when victim is in-group
    • When the group is victimized by an out-group, there is a net outflow of social capital
    • Who owns social capital
      • Status illegibility means that the group’s social capital is owned by everyone and no one
      • Alpha may act as group spokesperson, since they have a limited amount of authority over the group
      • Omega knows that he or she does not have very much social capital
      • Everyone else’s social capital balance is obscured by group illegibility
  • Empathy, or why you Losers cringe at Michael’s actions
    • If you have empathy, you can navigate all of the above social dynamics by instinct
    • Empathy is what causes us to cringe when someone else commits a social faux pas
    • Cringing serves two purposes
      • Alerts other party that their behavior is incorrect and gives them a chance to correct it before too much damage is done
      • Reminds oneself to not do that
    • We cringe at Michael because he is Clueless - does not recognize our cringe and therefore blunders on anyway, causing us to cringe more