The Gervais Principle

[thandeanderson]

The Gervais Principle is a theory designed by Venkatesh Rao to explain people's behavior in organizations, which fits in Science, Logic, and Morality because it attempts to justify the ethics of ruthless pragmatists. In order to spare you the pain of reading six long webchapters and more and the numerous examples from The Office, I'll summarize the key concepts.

The Gervais Principle I, also informally known as "Sociopaths, Losers and Clueless"
Rao chose to give edgy names to his categories, but they make sense. First, the "Sociopaths" are the amoral pragmatists who exploit the grey areas of the rules to benefit themselves, become the most powerful people in an organization, and who are willing to lie to their Clueless subordinates and exploit their Loser underlings. The Clueless are given power to manage by the "Sociopaths" but remain unaware of how the company works. The Losers are the exploited, given the lowest positions, fully aware of how the Sociopaths exploit them but powerless. Due to their despair, they slack at work and seek their happiness elsewhere.
The Gervais Principle itself is: Sociopaths promote Losers who don't even try to work on the tasks designed to exploit them to full Sociopathy; they promote Losers who are stupid enough to invest enough into their Sisyphean tasks into the Clueless and leave ordinary Losers to flail.

The GP II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk
Within organizations, the three groups interact in predictable ways. Because the "Sociopaths" know the losers know they're being exploited, they don't talk to them. The Losers themselves communicate to each other and other groups in "Gametalk", the not-communication covered in "I'm OK, You're OK". The Clueless, naturally, posture to communicate because of their ignorance. The Sociopaths communicate through Powertalk, which means they use verbal tactics and implied meanings to challenge other Sociopaths for power and to baffle the Clueless with bullshit. Rao goes on to explain why Powertalk must be situationally apropos. He writes about some Powertalk tactics in the "Be Slightly Evil" link.

The GP III: The Clueless
The Clueless can survive precisely due to their creative stupidity ,cf. creative sterility. Thus, the Clueless who looks for parent figures trumps the Clueless who seeks friends for coolness value.

The GP IV: The Losers
The Losers compete for status even while trying to join forces to change their situation.

The GP V: Heads I Win, Tails You Lose
Sociopaths make use of people's tendency to reassign blame to others by using a Clueless to get their goals done if they aren't acceptable. If the means aren't acceptable, they play dumb. They also manipulate Losers by divide-and-conquer so they're so busy fighting each other through bureaucratic procedures which drain the morale out of an organization.

The GP VI: Children of An Absent God
While Losers and Clueless let their happy memories color their view of the world, the ruthless Sociopaths do not. Instead, they use their objectivity to make themselves into god-figures for the Clueless and priest-figures for the Losers. Losers and Clueless can become Sociopaths when they lose faith in the just-so stories their superiors tell them and seek power. They receive a shock when they realize viscerally only one reality exists, in which they can categorize people as objects to be dealt with in a certain fashion, which is what "On The Exercise of Authoritah" is about.

The ultimate question behind the Gervais Principle is: should people seek to become Sociopaths in their organizations?

[Alyrium Denryle]

I have some reservations. I approved this topic because it could be interesting, but I see the potential for Shit.

It almost looks like this book was written by a sociopath trying to justify their own bullshit. The reality is, however, that when a company or organization is run by people who score high on Dark Triad traits (Psychopathy/Sociopathy, Machiavellianity, Narcissism) the performance of that company does poorly compared to when a company is not run by people who score highly on Dark Triad traits. Additionally, everyone is happier.

So I fail to see how it is justifiable for someone to attempt to become a sociopath (or a non-sociopath who acts like one) inside an organization. Moreover, given that most companies are run in a very top-down fashion, it is vanishingly rare for a person at the bottom of the hierarchy to rise to the top thereof through machination.

[thandeanderson]

What do you mean by "Shit"?
According to the Gervais Principle, a Sociopath can rise to the top if they take the right risks, impressing their superiors:

The future Sociopath must be an under-performer at the bottom. Like the average Loser, he recognizes that the bargain is a really bad one. Unlike the risk-averse loser though, he does not try to make the best of a bad situation by doing enough to get by.

[thandeanderson]

Here's Rao's logic behind why Sociopaths can rise to the top:

Dastardly as all this sounds, it is actually pretty efficient, given the inevitability of the MacLeod hierarchy and life cycle. 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. Without it, the company would explode like a nuclear bomb, rather than generate power steadily like a reactor. On the other hand, the business wouldn’t survive very long without enough people actually thinking in cold, calculating ways. The average-performing , mostly-disengaged Losers can create diminishing-margins profitability, but not sustainable performance or growth. You need a steady supply of Sociopaths for that, and you cannot waste time moving them slowly up the ranks, especially since 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.

[Zixinus]

If I were to try point out the failure of this idea, I would go with the assumption that there can only be three types of people as outlined. It simply assumes that there must be sociopaths and that there must be only that submit (clueless) or just accept their rule.

It is the madman's typical argument: it is actually everyone else that is mad, he's actually the only sane one. Same here: either everyone is a pragmatic sociopath, a sociopath's minion or will become one or even wants to become one.

That said, the model seems intriguing in how it seems to give sense to typical nonsensical behavior of managers and such.

[thandeanderson]

The author actually states people don't exactly fit any one "trajectory" in his comments section. Speaking of how the model explains behavior, I've actually seen kids in my school fit these three roles. The Gervais Principle became important to me after a Sociopath kicked me out after I tried to be friends with them.

[Alyrium Denryle]

What do you mean by "Shit"?
According to the Gervais Principle, a Sociopath can rise to the top if they take the right risks, impressing their superiors:

The future Sociopath must be an under-performer at the bottom. Like the average Loser, he recognizes that the bargain is a really bad one. Unlike the risk-averse loser though, he does not try to make the best of a bad situation by doing enough to get by.

By Shit, I mean the thread has the potential to be completely worthless or turn into a shitstorm.

I will start right now by saying that Sociopathy is not something one chooses. One is either born a sociopath, or made one through abuse. Thus, a corporate sociopath need not be an underperformer in the lower ranks. In fact, they are usually not. If you look at actual data, most sociopaths in the business world are the ones who went through business school and then went to work on wallstreet (or wherever) with the a priori intention of rising to the top of the ladder. They are categorically not enlightened rank and file.

Gervais is just wrong there.

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.

Except when sociopaths are in positions of power, the company itself suffers in the short run AND the long run. We have enough data to confirm that. A sociopath is very good at ladder climbing, they are not very good at delayed gratification or actually dealing well with other people on a sustained basis.

[thandeanderson]

The author isn't referring to people who have sociopathy as in the DSM-IV, but as in sociopaths in the slang expression: "You're a shit sociopath".

[Channel72]

This is interesting. I don't think Rao uses "Sociopath" in the clinical sense.

He basically uses "Sociopath", Clueless, and Loser to describe Executives, Middle Management and non-manager workers respectively.

I read the first part. It's interesting and rings true in a lot of ways. He's basically trying to describe how large organizations tend to function under Capitalism. He claims the "Peter Principle" is wrong, and that Executives actually tend to promote the most hard-working, over-achieving people to higher positions. This seems totally fair and common sense, but the reason (he claims) that Executives do this is because workers who actually over-achieve and work-hard are totally "Clueless", and therefore perfect for Middle-Management. Why are they clueless? Because the amount of value a typical hard working employee contributes to a large organization is usually much greater than the actual compensation. If a corporation brings in ~10 billion annually, and has 3,000 engineers, but only pays each engineer $100k in annual salary (a typical scenario in the US), the engineers are actually getting screwed because their collective work continues to generate revenue which enriches the Executives/Sociopaths and shareholders, while their salary will remain mostly stagnant forever (with small raises from time to time.)

So in other words, the people who actually work hard and give their all in such a scenario are "Clueless". The people who realize they're getting fucked (the majority of workers) are "Losers". They just coast along and do some minimal or mediocre amount of work, but don't put too much effort into it, and generally seek happiness outside of work via things like family or hobbies. They know they're getting fucked but don't have any alternative, and are too risk-averse to try anything different.

His idea is that a large layer of "Clueless" people (middle-management) is necessary both to shift blame away from Executives/Sociopaths in times of crises, and to act as a buffer between Executives and the actual producers/workers.

So basically it's a classic Marxist-style criticism of corporate-America, a refutation of the Peter Principle, and a psychological analysis of Office characters.

The main part I would disagree with is the idea that the "Clueless" layer of people are really so clueless that they don't realize all of this, or that Middle-Managers never break through to the ranks of the Executives (it happens all the time.) Rather, Rao claims that underachieving "Losers" more often break through to the Executive level via one-off risky "power-moves" that impresses somebody up top. That might happen in movies or in The Office, but in actual corporate America a typical "Clueless" Middle-Manager is more likely to eventually become an Executive.

[thandeanderson]

@Channel72: Rao actually seems to support corporate America because he has written positively about the Sociopaths in his book "Be Slightly Evil", as he subtitled it "A Playbook for Sociopaths". Other than that quibble, your analysis is indeed sound. NOTE: From experience, trying to use "power-moves" in a hierarchy, in this case, a group of students in school, can and does backfire quite easily, so your thesis is correct.

[Starglider]

This is a hopeless oversimplification beyond being pointlessly cynical for shock value. The most obvious thing that kills the categorisation is that neither 'sociopath' nor 'clueless' are binary qualities. There are not 'some sociopaths and everyone else'. Everyone has a unique self-image and weighting across possible benefits for themselves and other people. The difference between 'ambitious' and 'sociopathic' is a complicated categorisation across numerous dimensions. Similarly everyone has different levels of awareness of social and organisational dynamics, noticing some things and missing others. Similarly for relationships between staff; while they may fall into broad categories, if you fail to appreciate that every relationship is different and adapt to each one as it comes, you will fail at effective collaboration.

As such there are some elements of truth in this stuff but it's not really useful; the correct parts are already obvious to anyone who might expect to benefit from reading it.