The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)
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Do your best to be confident, kind, and engaged and you will run circles around the characters enumerated here, even the "winners".
People deserve dignity, even if they are (sometimes forced into) making economic choices you think suboptimal.
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
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.
The trap people fall into is an is-ought fallacy, where because they consider corporate dynamics immoral, they conclude that they are false.
One should work hard and be kind, but the determination to do so shouldn't cloud one's vision.
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.
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.
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.
I'd say, 99% of TV shows, cynical or otherwise, don't have that goal in mind, and is incapable of guiding you through life.
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.
Yes! That's why we have great leaders like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Mark Zuckerberg,Elizabeth Holmes, Vladimir Putin.
If anything the guide was not cynical enough. I saw stuff 10x worse in corporate environments.
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.
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.
That said, I believe this is an isolated and extremely rare incident.
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.
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.
If you loosen it all back up it's vague enough to be generally applicable.
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.
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.
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).
To add to the previous comment, Michael was also well known for making bad choices that did damage to his own life.
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.
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.
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 Office – How Michael Scott Makes a Sale
(7 min video essay)
TLDR he's a people-person.
^ 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).
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.
From https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/11/10/king-ruinous-and-the-c... on caste
"I am enough of a free-speecher to acknowledge that it has a right to"
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).
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.
> 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.