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Comment by neovialogistics | Hacker News Reader

Organizations, large and small, are all pathological. It isn't an epidemic of terrible social accidents, it's inherent to organizations as a method of grouping humans.

Essentially, people (and AFAIK, all primates) have a built in behavioural system to take excess credit for wins and minimize blame for losses. The details are a nasty tangle of evolutionary psychology but the consequences, in groups, are blame deficits. These deficits typically manifest as a simultaneous doublethink mix of low morale and unrealistic optimism. That's the pathology.

Good personnel management is about leveraging this instead of fighting it. I recommend The Organization Man (1956) and Moral Mazes (1988) if you want to read on the topic and/or fall asleep fast but if somebody knows a more recent text on the topic, please suggest it.

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> Essentially, people (and AFAIK, all primates) have a built in behavioural system to take excess credit for wins and minimize blame for losses.

Where did you get this from? Seems like a cynical view. I think it's just one end of a spectrum. I've definitely worked with people like this, but I also some that do the opposite - wins are for the team, failures are on them.

It applies at the team level as well. Those team players you know probably sing the victories of the team just a little more loudly than they televise their own failures.

It isn’t really that Machiavellian. At any operational level, humans and human organizations give more attention to their own successes than failures.

I initially came across it in somebody's review of The Red Queen but idk who. The book isn't exactly a must-read, though.

I was skeptical at first but I keep seeing the behaviour around me.

Taking credit for unearned wins while sloughing off deserved blame isn't general to hominids; the name for that pathology is narcissism. I'm not saying you're wrong to diagnose certain persons or organizations with that, but "cynical" is right.

You misunderstand. I'm not talking about manufacturing unearned credit or totally eliminating earned blame, I'm talking about distorting existing, deserved credit/blame to be moderately larger/smaller.

So, some organizations or individuals have a tendency to do this, and the tendency can be measured on a spectrum. There's an opposing spectrum that you're excluding, right? The people who take blame for things they rightly don't have to take blame for, who clean up messes that aren't their responsibility, and who shun credit. There are those people, and (we) keep the world running.

Claiming that the psychology you're projecting is universal is cynical because it excludes those people, or worse attempts to paint their efforts as merely meta-narcissistic victimhood, when lots of people actually just try to correct problems and get shit done.

I can't say that I've ever worked with anyone like that but my experience can't be universal.

I've never worked for a company with fewer than 200 employees, so maybe there's a correlation there.

I've never worked for a company with more than 30 employees or so, or on a team larger than 4... so it may be that the self-effacing people I'm describing tend to show up in smaller organizations. Or it may be that small teams bring out a side of people that's more willing to share the glory and shoulder the blame.

I've certainly worked with the type of people you're describing, but they stand out like a sore thumb in a smaller work environment. Their ego becomes a subject of contempt.

And also, just on a human level, there are many of us who don't aspire to glory. It might be as simple as having an internal sense of pride in knowing you did a job well, even if no one will ever know that you were the one who did it. I have a lot of friends who fit that description, who simply enjoy tinkering and building things and want little to do with the rest of the world. They make great employees for companies, but they're often overlooked because they don't promote themselves.

The Gervais Principle comes to mind.

Took a quick skim at that blog:

* It seems initially derivative of Moral Mazes - there are a couple sentences almost lifted wholesale.

* Part three seems more psychoanalytic than Moral Mazes and quite original.

* The fannish references to The Office are kinda irritating IMO. Might be less so if I'd watched more than a few episodes, probably the same for others.

I'm gonna give it a deeper look though.

A great read. Dude is a good writer.

Terrible point though. It's a humor post masquerading as a business / organizational analysis.

It filters 1950s mgmt books through a humorous comic and then through a fictional TV show. An organization viewed through the lens of fiction, then viewed through the lens of more fiction (a comic), and then through some old business management books. Very Simulation-vs-Simulacra.

It doesn't address this dynamic in particular, but reinventing organizations by Frederic Laloux is one text that makes me optimistic about the possibility of improving human organizational practices.

The most relevant prescription that book makes to your point is probably the proper diffusion of responsibility through empowering everyone to make executive decisions so long as they consult everyone that will be affected first. It's an interesting book.

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