151–154 of 154 posts
I would layer the 80-20 rule on top of this principle. For the 20% that get 80% of sh*t done, this doesn't apply imho. But for the other 80% it seems pretty accurate.
Company hierarchy: Sociopaths at the top > Clueless middle managers > Losers at the bottom. That's a bleak view, but I've worked in organizations that fit the model. To think that this could be the norm.. What if the model could be applied to human society in general! With such power dynamics, no wonder we seem to be barely hanging together with tense, mutual disrespect.
All of human society is like this. We dress it up and call it different names, but it's just feudalism all over again and again. People who grew up in the US, in luster and afterglow of the post-war boom, thought that our 50's, 60's, and 70's was the way of the world. But we've fallen back in line with the rest of the world now, and the forced shift in the American perspective is jarring.
In any case, it seems a common theme in the West that the society built during the height of the cold war is currently being milked in every way possible in the interests of the ruling class, with nothing new being built in its place.
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I had a boss who was a complete and utter sociopath (by the article's definitions), but there were few people I'd rather go to the pub and have a pint with. Dangerous combination. Gotta watch out for those. What he couldn't otherwise make happen through force of will, he could through personality. He's the CIO at some middling company now, and there's no way I'd connect to him on LinkedIn.
Why are people afraid of these sociopath types? I'm new to the corporate world, but it's not like they're going to just randomly attack you right?
When I finally got a chance to program something for him, towards the end of our time together, and it ran 5 times faster than his favored programmer, he questioned me like I had gotten someone else to do it or something. He was absolutely incredulous, never would admit that, hey, maybe I did know something about what I was talking about.
There's a quote that goes something like, "Never get between a jerk and his goals," and that's what it felt like, for an interminable 3 years.
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Agreed, but my interpretation of the following line: "The Gervais principle predicts the exact opposite: that the most competent ones will be promoted to middle management." Ie, the competent losers become Clueless. Hence they're capable of jumping ship / or even starting a business if not for their 'delusional loyalty'. (My point being that lots of company brainwashing mentioned by OP attempts to groom Clueless thou…
"Competent" on the object level - they are the people that are really good at the technical aspects of their job, but really bad at reading social cues or playing the political game. When they leave to found startups (and I've done this, as a Clueless), they are the ones who build a brilliantly engineered product that nobody wants, or stumble upon a hot idea only to get forced out by a VC's termsheet that they didn't…
Overcoming that fear of failure and finding some Losers to help your new startup, according to the GP theory, I guess labels you as a Clueless turned Sociopath, but if you swap terms to 'Middle Manager turned CEO' I think it becomes more of an enabling perspective. (One reason I think the negative labels here can hurt folks' ambitions!!)