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The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)

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Re: The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)

#181

Post by throaway812 »

usrnm wrote: post #146
zahllos wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the parent poster, the author sounds very bitter. Might not be true, they might be trying at humour and I haven't got it. But I think doing the minimum you can get away with is playing with fire. Your colleagues will resent you. You're also sending a signal to everyone that will be remembered. Maybe a colleague will start a business or move to another place one day. Are they going to employ the minimum e…

> Your colleagues will resent you Why would they? We're all adults and all more or less understand the rules of the game. And in rare cases in my career when the company culture was all about working long hours and living at work, I just tend not to stick in such places for long

[flagged]

Re: The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)

#183

Post by zahllos »

usrnm wrote: post #146
zahllos wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the parent poster, the author sounds very bitter. Might not be true, they might be trying at humour and I haven't got it. But I think doing the minimum you can get away with is playing with fire. Your colleagues will resent you. You're also sending a signal to everyone that will be remembered. Maybe a colleague will start a business or move to another place one day. Are they going to employ the minimum e…

> Your colleagues will resent you Why would they? We're all adults and all more or less understand the rules of the game. And in rare cases in my career when the company culture was all about working long hours and living at work, I just tend not to stick in such places for long

It depends where you draw the line of "enough to get by". There are two cases: case A is where the expectations exceed what you're really being paid for, i.e. those cases you mention where the company culture is long hours. This isn't what I'm on about, but for completeness, these places are awful to work at and I definitely agree escaping them is the most rational thing to do.

Case B is different. Case B is where you work somewhere with reasonable work-life balance, but where you have a colleague who persistently under-performs. They won't do the essential documentation, follow the process correctly and they will quite happily sit through meetings and not volunteer a solution they know the answer to unless explicitly asked in just the right way and they happen to feel like it that day. This can take a few different forms - my list is not exclusive but it boils down to "quiet quitting" - but, as you say we are all adults, and we know who these people are.

Re: The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)

#184

Post by Lammy »

cen4 wrote: post #18
trojanalert wrote: post #12

To be read in conjunction with the Babbler hypothesis - The amount of time some people spend talking gets them into leadership positions. It doesn't matter what they say, just how much they rant on. I read that, and realised how insanely true it is

Well these observations have nothing with to do with the main conundrum - How do you keep a group of chimps who all have different interests, personalities, needs, beliefs, values, upbringings, culture, religion, language, history etc etc in sync? And these days groups grow quite large quite fast. Historically, if you take rewards, bribery, force, domination and manipulation out of the story, the babblers/non threate…

> How do you keep a group of chimps who all have different interests, personalities, needs, beliefs, values, upbringings, culture, religion, language, history etc etc in sync?

Humans aren't chimps. Our closest animal relative is the Bonobo, and the corporate world would be a much more interesting place if we solved our conflicts the way they do: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bonobo-sex-and-so...

Re: The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)

#185

Post by _yb2s »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #160
_yb2s wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meyers briggs is not “astrology” - it doesn’t claim to predict anything. It categorizes how people already consciously see themselves with Carl Jungs archetypes. The main point of the archetype concept is to then explore the part of you that is different from how you see yourself- your “shadow” for the purpose of personal development. It’s not mysterious, mystical, or claiming to be science- it’s just a very simple s…

>It’s not ... claiming to be science- The history section of the Wikipedia page reads like an awful lot of effort went into making it seem scientific. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers–Briggs_Type_Indicator This part also seems like it was intended to be predictive: >Briggs and Myers began creating their indicator during World War II (1939–1945)[7] in the belief that a knowledge of personality preferences would hel…

You are correct- what used to be considered scientific psychology is not up to the standards of rigor that we would still call it science nowadays.

It was at one point used as a psychology research tool, but it does not work well for e.g. predicting mental health outcome differences in different groups of people, and has been superseded by things like the Big Five personality traits, which are slightly better but also probably not that useful. MBTI is probably inappropriate and useless in the workplace as other people on here are complaining about.

Nowadays, I don't think it is appropriate to use it for anything except "for fun" or as a simplified tool for making sense of and using some of Carl Jungs ideas and techniques.

Carl Jung himself has had a lot of pushback in modern times for not using scientific methodology, and having ideas and methods that aren't even testable with modern scientific methods. I've heard people even say he "set psychology back 50 years with pseudoscience."

I disagree with that, because his methods and ideas work very well for myself and a lot of people. I think he was way ahead of his time in finding "hacks" that work to improve mental health, and overcome psychological challenges... however his ideas and methods were so far ahead of his time it will be a very long time still before they could potentially be connected to any sort of mechanistic or biological psychology, or neuroscience. They should probably be regarded more as spiritual or psychotherapy tools, in the same vein as things like meditation- but still not totally worthless nonsense like astrology.

Re: The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)

#186

Post by lotsofpulp »

_yb2s wrote: post #185
lotsofpulp wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It’s not ... claiming to be science- The history section of the Wikipedia page reads like an awful lot of effort went into making it seem scientific. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers–Briggs_Type_Indicator This part also seems like it was intended to be predictive: >Briggs and Myers began creating their indicator during World War II (1939–1945)[7] in the belief that a knowledge of personality preferences would hel…

You are correct- what used to be considered scientific psychology is not up to the standards of rigor that we would still call it science nowadays. It was at one point used as a psychology research tool, but it does not work well for e.g. predicting mental health outcome differences in different groups of people, and has been superseded by things like the Big Five personality traits, which are slightly better but als…

Thanks for the cogent responses providing an alternative view!

Re: The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)

#187

Post by nkrisc »

_yb2s wrote: post #54
nkrisc wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“INFJ”, that’s from that workplace astrology, right?

Meyers briggs is not “astrology” - it doesn’t claim to predict anything. It categorizes how people already consciously see themselves with Carl Jungs archetypes. The main point of the archetype concept is to then explore the part of you that is different from how you see yourself- your “shadow” for the purpose of personal development. It’s not mysterious, mystical, or claiming to be science- it’s just a very simple s…

I understand perfectly well what I've encountered. What I've personally encountered in the workplace was workplace astrology.

Whether or not that's what it is in the books it's described in or elsewhere is immaterial to me.

Re: The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)

#188

Post by silexia »

throwaway7ahgb wrote: post #78
pelagicAustral wrote: post #61

I love The Office (UK version). It is one of my all time favorites, and crudely enough, after so many years of being a fan, I got a taste of what having David Brent as a boss is like... My Boss is so much like Gervais' character, that it is almost like God is taking a piss on me. I absolutely hate my current work environment, and it is all fueled by the archetype of boss caricatured in The Office. It is real, then ag…

Why haven't you been able to get an offer somewhere else?

Organizations have adopted clear Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies stating that you need to be a certain oppressed race and gender to get ahead regardless of other qualifications. So if you are an Asian or white male, you need not apply.

Re: The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)

#189

Post by j_crick »

thayne wrote: post #152

I think this is at best incomplete. For example, there are people who work as value producers who overperform not because they are "clueless" -- they are well aware that the company is not loyal to them, and they got a "bad deal" -- but because they enjoy the work they do, or they have an internal drive to do a good job at whatever they do, or they believe doing a good job makes a difference in the world, etc. And at…

That they know they got a bad deal and they keep going along with its badness, and/or do it to look morally good to themselves, or something like that, is exactly what buckets them as clueless.

Re: The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)

#190

Post by cainxinth »

stonethrowaway wrote: post #140
cainxinth wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A related type is the Jargonist, who not only speaks endlessly but in a stream of acronyms, buzz words, and insider coded language.

Name drops?

That too
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