41–50 of 154 posts
>(the office) I’ve been unable to figure out what makes it so devastatingly effective, and elevates it so far above the likes of Dilbert and Office Space. Dilbert is a hand drawn comic so it will never have the media reach of TV. It also tends to focus more on the details of the bureaucratic brokenness for people to laugh rather than cry at in daily life. The office is syndicated TV with a new episode every week. It…
I love The Office, but I don’t believe that the writers actually have some deep knowledge of business psychology and hierarchy. It seems pointless to attempt a deep analysis through that lens.
Personally, even if this is not from some deep intellectual tradition of management theory, it helped me see things that I'd been staring at my whole career without understanding. One way it changed my perspective is that it helped me realize that the loyalty of middle management strivers is real, the realest in the company. I used to assume that company rah-rah and loyalty rhetoric was meant to increase the performance and affordability of front-line workers, i.e., that the leaf node employees were the target, and middle management was the delivery mechanism. Middle management parroted loyalty rhetoric to their employees to show upper management that they were carrying out their plans in a capable way and could be perhaps trusted with a promotion.
But that never quite made sense. Inspirational company rhetoric is actively irritating to most employees. It's an odd misfit in the front lines of a large company who feels inspired by company boosterism, and they either learn to keep their enthusiasm under wraps, or they are disliked by their fellow workers, who embrace the Loser mentality. Since all the company rah-rah stuff seemed stupid and unproductive, my theory about why companies did it was that it was a peculiar blindness of the otherwise smart people who run companies. But now I realize that if you see middle management as the target, and front-line workers as collateral damage, the cult of loyalty makes a lot of sense. Looking at managers now, I can see that a lot of them buy into it on an emotional and intellectual level, and they believe that it will contribute to their rise in the organization. It works on them! That's why companies do it!
I know people who told their managers that they thought company morale campaigns were creating resentment and cynicism among their fellow employees. They did this in a spirit of openness, as something that management should be aware of, and they suffered real though unofficial consequences. From a cynical, utilitarian perspective, the retaliation they suffered was hard to make sense of. It was petty and ineffective. But it makes sense if you realize that they were attacking an intensely felt part of their managers' self-identity, and their managers' reaction reflected personal hurt, not rational calculation.
I never understood those things until I read this blog post. I always assumed that the cynicism about company values started at the lowest level of management, that management was a tower of atheists acting out the company religion for the sake of the believing suckers at the bottom. But that was a poor fit for reality compared to the Sociopath/Clueless/Losers structure.
The worst manager I ever had used to keep a copy of The Prince at his desk. He definitely looked at other people the way this article seems to encourage you to.
And you missed a chance to replace it with Le Petit Prince.
I love The Office, but I don’t believe that the writers actually have some deep knowledge of business psychology and hierarchy. It seems pointless to attempt a deep analysis through that lens.
The worst manager I ever had used to keep a copy of The Prince at his desk. He definitely looked at other people the way this article seems to encourage you to.
A bizarre choice if they were middle management; the running of a kingdom in the Prince is only really directly applicable to highest levels of C-suite management.
>(the office) I’ve been unable to figure out what makes it so devastatingly effective, and elevates it so far above the likes of Dilbert and Office Space. Dilbert is a hand drawn comic so it will never have the media reach of TV. It also tends to focus more on the details of the bureaucratic brokenness for people to laugh rather than cry at in daily life. The office is syndicated TV with a new episode every week. It…
Dilbert does have a cartoon TV series that ran for 2 seasons. https://youtu.be/J1KEPvuiQIs
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dilbert does have a cartoon TV series that ran for 2 seasons. https://youtu.be/J1KEPvuiQIs
I remember watching it as a kid and realizing that cartoons could be not good... is it better several decades later?
This is a thought-provoking read. I'm currently going through Meta onboarding for the third time (once before as an intern and once full-time). The first time it was exciting; the second time it was interesting but seemed quaint, but still, neat for a first-time job; the third time it feels like a pipeline for molding the exact sort of Clueless people the article describes.
Having worked in faang as well for a while now, I can attest that most people seem to be capable of jumping to their own startups very easily. Companies need to craft very enticing reasons to stay on as a 'Loser' (mostly via perks and pay) and even work harder to retain 'Clueless' since the latter is even more likely to leave and launch a startup being leadership focused. 'Sociopaths' are so few that they're easily g…