THE GERVAIS PRINCIPLE by Venkatesh Rao

• This is just a cheap and easily digestible basic organizational literacy 101 guide written in what is hopefully an accessible and contemporary style rather than impenetrable Nietzschean verse.
• But there is a cost to getting organizationally literate. This ability, once acquired, cannot be un-acquired.
• Literacy of any sort gives you the power to recognize and unambiguously label things that the illiterate can easily ignore as noise, fads and bullshit.
• Literacy of any sort is a good thing. Organizational literacy is liberal education in the best sense of the term: it increases your freedom by making you more alive to the possibilities around you.
• The Office is not a random series of cynical gags aimed at momentarily alleviating the existential despair of low-level grunts. It is a fully realized theory of management that falsifies 83.8% of the business section of the bookstore.
• The theory begins with Hugh MacLeod’s well-known cartoon, Company Hierarchy, shown below, and its cornerstone is something I will call “The Gervais Principle,” which supersedes both the Peter Principle and its successor, The Dilbert Principle.
• Hugh MacLeod’s cartoon is a pitch-perfect symbol of an unorthodox school of management based on the axiom that organizations don’t suffer pathologies; they are intrinsically pathological constructs.
• The Sociopath (capitalized) layer comprises the Darwinian/Protestant Ethic will-to-power types who drive an organization to function despite itself.
• The Clueless layer is what Whyte called the “Organization Man,” but the archetype inhabiting the middle has evolved a good deal since Whyte wrote his book in the fifties.
• The Losers are not social losers (as in the opposite of “cool”), but people who have struck bad bargains economically – giving up capitalist striving for steady paychecks.
• Of all organization men, the true executive is the one who remains most suspicious of The Organization.
• A Sociopath with an idea recruits just enough Losers to kick off the cycle. As it grows, it requires a Clueless layer to turn it into a controlled reaction, rather than a runaway explosion. Eventually, as value hits diminishing returns, both the Sociopaths and Losers make their exits, and the Clueless start to dominate. Finally, the hollow brittle shell collapses on itself, and anything of value is recycled by the Sociopaths, according to meta-firm logic.
• The good news is that Losers have two ways out, which we’ll get to later: turning Sociopath or turning into bare-minimum performers. The Losers destined for Cluelessness do not have a choice.
• The Sociopaths enter and exit organizations at will, at any stage, and do whatever it takes to come out on top. They contribute creativity in early stages of a organization’s life, neurotic leadership in the middle stages, and cold-bloodedness in the later stages, where they drive decisions like mergers, acquisitions and layoffs that others are too scared or too compassionate to drive. They are also the ones capable of equally impersonally exploiting a young idea for growth in the beginning, killing one good idea to concentrate resources on another at maturity, and milking an end-of-life idea through harvest-and-exit market strategies.
• The Losers like to feel good about their lives. They are the happiness seekers, rather than will-to-power players, and enter and exit reactively, in response to the meta-Darwinian trends in the economy. But they have no more loyalty to the firm than the Sociopaths. They do have a loyalty to individual people, and a commitment to finding fulfillment through work when they can, and coasting when they cannot.
• The Clueless are the ones who lack the competence to circulate freely through the economy (unlike Sociopaths and Losers), and build up a perverse sense of loyalty to the firm, even when events make it abundantly clear that the firm is not loyal to them.
• The Gervais Principle is this: Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing Losers into middle-management, groom under-performing Losers into Sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort Losers to fend for themselves.
• The Peter Principle states that all people are promoted to the level of their incompetence. It is based on the assumption that future promotions are based on past performance.
• 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.
• Scott Adams, seeing a different flaw in The Peter Principle, proposed The Dilbert Principle: that companies tend to systematically promote their least-competent employees to middle management to limit the damage they can do. This again is untrue.
• So why is promoting over-performing Losers logical? The simple reason is that if you over-perform at the Loser level, it is clear that you are an idiot. You’ve already made a bad bargain, and now you’re delivering more value than you need to, making your bargain even worse. Unless you very quickly demonstrate that you know your own value by successfully negotiating more money and/or power, you are marked out as an exploitable clueless Loser.
• A Loser who can be suckered into bad bargains is set to become one of the Clueless.
• The future Sociopath must be an under-performer at the bottom.
• the Loser game is not worth becoming good at.
• The career of the Loser is the easiest to understand. Having made a bad bargain, and not marked for either Clueless or Sociopath trajectories, he or she must make the best of a bad situation. The most rational thing to do is slack off and do the minimum necessary.
• The Sociopaths know that the only way to make an organization capable of survival is to buffer the intense chemistry between the producer-Losers and the leader-Sociopaths with enough Clueless padding in the middle to mitigate the risks of business.
• The average-performing , mostly-disengaged Losers can create diminishing-margins profitability, but not sustainable performance or growth.
• the standard promotion/development path is primarily designed to maneuver the Clueless into position wherever they are needed.
• The Sociopaths must be freed up as much as possible to actually run the business, with or without official titles.
• Sociopaths use Powertalk as a coded language with which to simultaneously sustain the (necessary) delusions of the Clueless and communicate with each other.
• The Gervais Principle operates at the slow tempo of promotions, demotions, layoffs and hirings. The bulk of organizational life, however, plays out much faster: one conversation at a time.
• Powertalk is the in-group language of the Sociopaths.
• Posturetalk is the language spoken by the Clueless to everybody.
• Sociopaths and Losers talk back to the Clueless in a language called Babytalk that seems like Posturetalk to the Clueless.
• Among themselves, Losers speak a language called Gametalk.
• I won’t cover it at all, but you can learn all about it in the pop classics on transactional analysis (TA) from 30 years ago: Eric Berne’s Games People Play and What Do You Say after You Say Hello, and Thomas Harris’ I’m OK–You’re OK.
• Add these three books to the two I already referenced, The Organization Man and Images of Organization.)
• Sociopaths and Losers rarely speak to each other at all.
• Losers can partially understand, but not speak Powertalk. To them, Powertalk is a spectator sport.
• Multiple layers of meaning are not what make Powertalk unique.
• What distinguishes Powertalk is that with every word uttered, the power equation between the two speakers shifts just a little.
• Gametalk leaves power relations unchanged because its entire purpose is to help Losers put themselves and each other into safe pigeonholes that validate do-nothing life scripts.
• In Powertalk, you play with valuable currency, usually reality-information. In the other languages, you are playing with no stakes.
• The most important enabling factor in being able to speak Powertalk is simply the possession of table stakes. Without it, whatever you say is Posturetalk.
• The only Powertalk you can speak without any table stakes is “silence.”
• The bulk of Sociopath communication takes places out in the open, coded in Powertalk, right in the presence of non-Sociopaths.
• So effective Sociopaths stick with steadfast discipline to the letter of the law, internal and external, because the stupidest way to trip yourself up is in the realm of rules where the Clueless and Losers get to be judges and jury members.
• Though distant from our worlds, criminal worlds have the one advantage that they do not need to maintain the fiction that the organization is not pathological, so they are revealing to study.
• People who try earnestly to learn Powertalk from recipe books end up merely expanding their Posturetalk vocabulary.
• Toy Guns is the vocabulary of empty machismo.
• A good way to remember this is to think of Powertalk as decisions about what verbal tactics to use when, and with what. The answer to with what is usually a part of your table-stakes.
• Bottomline: you cannot learn Powertalk from books.
• Vocabulary expansion efforts can at best put the finishing touches on organically acquired language skills.
• There is no shortcut to organic language acquisition; reading well-written stuff and writing constantly are the only way.
• You learn through real Powertalk conversations with other Sociopaths.
• Along every learning curve, between the early, instant gratification (which I’ve been hawking so far) and useful mastery, there is a long hard slog: what Seth Godin calls the “Dip.”
• the depth of any transaction is limited by the depth of the shallower party.
• At the level of abstraction that we are concerned with, all theories of developmental psychology – Freud’s, Piaget’s, Erikson’s, Maslow’s – say roughly the same thing about arrested development: you are born Clueless, and get clued in in fits and starts.
• Well-adjustedness is a measure of the degree to which your worldview is socially acceptable and appropriate in a given environment.
• If your situational reactions are generally appropriate but against your best interests, you are a well-adjusted Loser. If they are both appropriate and in your best interests, you are a Sociopath. If your reactions are inappropriate (whether or not they are in your best interests – sometimes they are), you are Clueless.
• 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 either the talented or the untalented.
• A strength in one situation is merely an entrenched piece of arrested development in another.
• The Clueless distort reality. The Losers distort rewards and penalties. The Sociopaths distort the metaphysics of human life.
• it is always hard for a student to teach a teacher, even if the student is studying a subject that is more advanced than the one the teacher teaches.
• To manufacture original thought you have to listen to reality in open ways for data.
• The language of winning and losing and debts is useful for all interactions, but it is only consequential, and capable of causing power shifts, when Sociopaths are involved.
• Social clubs of any sort divide the world into an us and a them. We are better than them. Any prospective new member who could raise the average prestige of a club is, by definition, somebody who is too good for that club.
• Status illegibility is necessary to keep a group of Losers stable.
• forming groups is a Loser activity).
• Loser dynamics are largely driven by Lake-Wobegon-effect snow jobs, which obscure pervasive mediocrity.
• Only the alpha can legitimately confer the #2 title, and there is rarely a good reason for the alpha to do so unless he or she is planning to exit.
• A social skill, such as joke-telling ability, is a behavior whose effectiveness is determined by the reaction of a group. A joke is funny if the audience laughs.
• In general, the creation of social capital depends entirely on the reactions of the audience.
• Laugh/frown votes are a powerful weapon for the passive members of any situational group.
• Sociopath jokes usually involve straight-faced delivery and private laughter, with no hint of mockery.
• Among the Sociopaths, status is irrelevant. Table stakes and skill at using them is what matters. Sociopaths pay attention to what you have, and how well you bargain with it. Not who you are.
• But among Losers, status is real, and it matters.
• Among Losers, in specific situations, status may go up or down, but overall, it just goes round and round. There is no grand status hierarchy. Only a top, a bottom, and an illegible middle.
• happiness is entirely a social phenomenon, and there’s plenty of evidence that the best way (and from my reading, the only way) to get happy is to get sociable.
• The basic mechanism by which Sociopaths transfer blame to the Clueless, while reducing the overall severity of the penalty, is an application of Hanlon’s Razor: never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
• Because Hanlon’s Razor is often true, it is a believable dodge even when it is not.
• When means are defensible, but ends are not, Sociopaths engineer execution failures via indirection and abstraction in the requests they make, thereby achieving their ends via “lucky accidents.” This is the second kind of Hanlon Dodge.
• when you genuinely want to give reports responsibilities that help them grow, you give them autonomy where they are strong. When you want to use them in engineered “failures” that give you the outcomes you want, you give them autonomy in areas where they are weak.
• The Clueless and Losers debate whether or not ends justify the means. Sociopaths use whatever is justifiable to cover up whatever they want to get done. The result is a theater of justification.
• Loser group dynamics offer a natural exploit: almost anyone can be made to ally with, or turn against, anybody else, with no need to manufacture reasons.
• A successful group systematically overvalues its capabilities and develops a blindness to its weaknesses.
• Losers have a genuine sense of honor. The want to accept fair blame for failures and fair credit for successes.
• You’ve probably heard a piece of cynical wisdom: the purpose of a form is not to serve the person who submits it, but to protect the person who processes it.
• The risk-management work of an organization can be divided into two parts: the unpredictable part that is the responsibility of the line hierarchy, and the predictable, repetitive part that is the responsibility of the staff hierarchy.
• As a friend once remarked, tax law is complex for a reason: its primary purpose is to catalyze the growth of complicated exception-handling on top of an apparently simple percentage calculation.
• There are only three ways to get a bureaucracy to do anything it wasn’t designed to do: by stealth, with secret and deniable support from allies in the staff hierarchy; by getting air-cover from a sufficiently high-up Sociopath who can play poker with whichever oversubscribed Sociopath is in charge of exception-handling for the specific process (i.e. jumping the appeals queue and calling in favors to ensure the required ruling); and through corruption and bribery.
• That is what Sociopaths ultimately do with their lives if they survive long enough: generate amoral power from increasing inner emptiness, transforming themselves into forces of nature.
• When Sociopaths turn their attentions en masse to new frontiers, they leave behind complete cargo cults that continue to function for a while.
• The Sociopath journey begins with what is essentially a religious dissatisfaction. A dissatisfaction that awakens the first time Sociopaths contemplate their situation in life.
• Sociopaths progressively rip away layer after layer of social reality.
• Small minds discuss people, average minds discuss events. Great minds discuss ideas.
• When Sociopaths accept the divine roles that the Clueless and Losers eagerly thrust upon them, they find themselves ruling the realities of others. But any human stand-in for an omnipotent conception of divinity must ultimately betray the believer.
• The key, when betraying the Clueless, is to get them to blame themselves. With Losers, the key is to get them to blame each other.
• The Clueless seek idols to emulate.
• the minds of Losers turn to endlessly reliving social events and the associated churn of status and emotions.
• By operating with a more complete calculus, Sociopaths are able to manipulate this world through the divide-and-conquer mechanisms.
• Guilt is the one emotion that Losers cannot always resolve for themselves, since it sometimes requires quantities of forgiveness that mere humans cannot dispense, but priests can, as reserve bankers of the fiat currencies of Loser emotional life.
• Losers are usually collectively, rather than singly betrayed, but Sociopaths are created one at a time.
• Sociopaths find ideas contending in their minds. The creative destruction they script in the world of Losers and Clueless is mirrored by a creative destruction in their minds. This process creates power, but destroys meaning, especially the meanings of social realities. The result is increasing inner emptiness and external power.
• Recall that Sociopaths create meaning for others through the things they subtract, rather than the things they add.
• This is something conspiracy theorists typically don’t get: manufacturing fake realities is very hard. But subtractive simplification of reality is much easier, and yields just as much power.
• Sociopaths exercise agency on behalf of others. They do not grab power. Power is simply ceded to them.
• Sociopathy is not about ripping off a specific mask from the face of social reality. It is about recognizing that there are no social realities. There are only masks.
• Social realities exist as a hierarchy of increasingly sophisticated and specialized fictions for those predisposed to believe that there is something special about the human condition, which sets our realities apart from the rest of the universe.
• By humanizing the non-human universe, we make the human special.
• All that is required is to control people who believe in fairness, is to remove any evidence suggesting that the world might fundamentally not be a fair place, and mask it appropriately with a justice principle such as an afterlife calculus, or a retirement fantasy.
• When a layer of social reality is penetrated and turned into a means for manipulating the realities of others, it is automatically devalued.
• Once the Sociopath overcomes reality shock and frames his life condition as one defined by an absence of ultimate parental authority, and the fictitious nature of all social realities, he experiences a great sense of unlimited possibilities and power.
• Sociopath freedom of speech is the freedom to bullshit: they are bullshit artists in the truest sense of the phrase.
• Non-Sociopaths, as Jack Nicholson correctly argued, really cannot handle the truth. The truth of an absent god. The truth of social realities as canvases for fiction for those who choose to create them.
• Creative destruction is not a script, but the absence of scripts.
• But freedom can also be a scary condition. It offers no canned reasons to do one thing instead of another, or even do anything at all. It offers no fixed motivations. There is nobody to blame for failures, no meaningful external validation for success.
• If physics allows it, you can do it. The consequences mean whatever you decide they mean.
• What is known cannot now be un-known. There is no way to reverse the effects of the red pill of Sociopathy.
• Peter, Michael and Samir, at the start of the story, are grappling with the gradual draining of freedom that is the consequence of socialization into middle-class scripts. It is a kind of loss, and where there is loss, there will be Kubler-Ross.
• The major theme of Office Space, unlike The Office, is not deciphering and navigating the gridlock on the road to power, but exiting the rat-race altogether, to a state held up as an ideal of freedom: exile.
• The association between criminality and exile is a widely recognized one. This is why the term outlaw has connotations of both exile and criminality.
• While exits from the prevailing social order are not exactly blocked off, a toll must be paid in order to pass through: to even seek an existence outside the legitimate part of the social order is to accept being marked as a potential criminal.
• Not all criminal classes are exile classes, and not all exile classes are criminal classes.
• This is the central cognitive dissonance in Peter’s life: there is literally nothing keeping him trapped in his gridlock script, not even money.
• Tom’s idea of freedom is that holy grail of exit scripts: a passive income stream.
• our perceptions of objective value are colored by our perceptions of class and social status.
• Most people recognize that many blue-collar jobs pay more than white-collar jobs. Few act on that recognition.
• Freedom is about more than walking through an unlocked exit door. It is also about figuring out how to avoid the default catastrophic fates and how to deal with the burden of negative perceptions associated with seeking an exit. It is about surviving exit wounds, if you’ll forgive a terrible pun. The first step is to choose a voluntary exit rather than waiting to be forced out.
• Every month, a fresh cohort of script-bound middle-class white-collar workers attempts to break free, armed with nothing more than some savings, vague startup or artistic dreams, and the idea that there can be more to life than gradual dehumanization to Miltonhood.
• Most only manage empty gestures and remain fundamentally trapped, never even making it to a real exit path. The rockstar road, backpacking walkabout and startup dream all turn out to be improvised subplots within the main script rather than clean breaks from it. As a cynical reader once remarked to me, you can take a person out of the middle class, but you cannot take the middle class out of a person.
• Breaking through internal mental barriers is the essential step.
• You can be free in a cubicle or remain trapped while wandering in the desert.
• The only true exit is to a freer mind.
• Organizational literacy is a skill.
• The equivalent of writing is practicing behaviors designed to influence people and organizations.