The Gervais Principle II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk

November 11, 2009 By

We began this analysis of corporate life by exploring a  theoretical construct (the Gervais Principle) through the character arcs of Michael and Ryan in The Office. The construct and examples provide a broad-strokes treatment of the why of the power dynamics among Sociopaths, the Clueless and Losers.

Series Home | Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | ebook

 

This helps us understand how the world works, but not how to work it. So let me introduce you to the main skill required here, mastery over the four major languages spoken in organizations, among Sociopaths, Losers and the Clueless. I’ll call the four languages Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk. Here’s a picture of who speaks what to whom. Let’s use it to figure out how to make friends and influence people, Office style.

langsTom

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One Good Thing About the ‘Flu

November 5, 2009 By

I have been down with the ‘flu for the last few days. It has been quite a while since I’ve been sick enough that I’ve had to mostly stay in bed, and I am writing this in the couple of hours of Advil-created non-feverish semi-coherent lucidity the Viral Gods have granted me today. So after catching up with emergency work emails and deferring/rescheduling everything else, I thought I’d dash off a quick post sharing an interesting thought that occurred to me.

Here’s the thought: I feel almost guilty admitting this, but there is an aspect of flu-like mild-to-moderate short-term illnesses (knock on wood) that I actually enjoy. I don’t know if others experience ‘flu the same way, but in my case, I usually suffer through a few cycles of alternating fever/body pain and cool clamminess. For most of the fever part of the cycle, your body is rebelling enough that both thought and sleep are nearly impossible.  Your head and eyes ache too much to allow reading or TV watching. Thoughts are feverish and half-hallucinatory. If you do manage to fall asleep for an hour or so, the dreams are hallucinatory. But then comes the reward: during the second half of the cycle, when you sweat and your skin turns cool and moist and the body pain recedes for a while, you are too exhausted to think, but cool and pain free enough that you feel utterly relaxed.

It is a kind of deep relaxation that is becoming increasingly hard to find for most people. It takes a virus to slow us down enough that the million anxieties that routinely bother us are held at bay for a while.

On an unrelated note, I had nearly finished the sequel to the Gervais Principle post when the ‘flu struck. I’ll get to it when I recover, but in the meantime, enjoy this Chekov short story, one  of my favorites: A Defenceless Creature.  It is actually relevant.  Anyone in the story remind you of Michael?

Baital Pachisi: An Indian Vampire Meta-Story

October 30, 2009 By

Pondering the glut of vampire fiction and television dramas this Halloween, I thought I’d share a fun-scary piece of my childhood. This is the traditional Indian meta-folktale, Baital Pachisi (The Twenty Five Tales of Baital). It concerns the wise King Bikram and a rather strange philosopher ghoul-vampire, a Baital (sometimes spelled Betaal or Vetal). I have no clue about its historical origins, but Wikipedia attributes the tales to the 8th century poet Bhavabhuti, and identifies the hero, the fictional King Bikram, with the real King Vikramaditya of Ujjain (102 BC to 15 AD). Here is a depiction of the core premise of the folktale by Harshad Dhavale (public domain):

439px-Vetal

The stories are curiously interesting because they set philosophical, moral and ethical conundrums in the context of a life-or-death struggle between Bikram and the baital. Here’s how they run.

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Fear of Improvisation (and Clunkers)

October 26, 2009 By

Late Saturday afternoon, I headed out from my apartment to pick up my wife from the airport, about 30 miles away. It was pouring and cold. Traffic was heavy and slow as I caught 395 North into the district. Just as I was about to enter the tunnel that leads into Washington, DC, I heard it: a loud, ugly CLUNK! followed by the jarring tinny racket that tells you that your car is dragging something metallic along. A minute later, I heard the harsh throb of an unmuffled engine. I took the first exit I could, which unfortunately, dumped me right into the heart of Washington, DC. I found a parking spot and stepped out. As I’d suspected, it was my exhaust. A bracket had broken and the exhaust assembly was being dragged along. Here’s a picture of the fix I improvised with my belt, before driving back home. I expect it will hold up fine for the additional mile or so to my repair shop on Monday.

exhaust

The fix, as you can see, is not a particularly clever one. What struck me though, as I thought of it, was how just how long I spent on dumb, unproductive by-the-book “call AAA” thoughts before giving myself permission to figure out this obvious fix. It strikes me that quite often, what holds us back from improvising creative options is not lack of creativity or ingenuity, but a vague fear of improvisation itself. So I poked around the idea a little bit and realized that the fear of improvisation is really the fear of death. Here’s why.

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Hello to Slashdotters, Gervais Principle Follow-Ups

October 14, 2009 By

I don’t do many meta posts, but yesterday’s slashdotting (thanks @kdawson) of the Gervais Principle post, complete with a couple of hours of server-choking,  certainly demands one. The day easily broke all traffic, comment and coffee-buying records on this blog. So, a “Hello!” to everybody who found ribbonfarm.com through Slashdot, and I hope you sign up for the RSS feed or email list. I am posting this to introduce you to the rest of this blog and do a quick initial reaction to the comments (here, on Slashdot, Twitter, and on Hacker News).  So here goes.

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The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to “The Office”

October 7, 2009 By

My neighbor introduced me to The Office back in 2005. Since then, I’ve watched every episode of both the British and American versions. I’ve watched the show obsessively because 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.

Series Home | Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | ebook

Until now, that is. Now, after four years, I’ve finally figured the show out.  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 (below), and its cornerstone is something I will call The Gervais Principle, which supersedes both the Peter Principle and its successor, The Dilbert Principle. Outside of the comic aisle, the only major and significant works consistent with the Gervais Principle are The Organization Man and Images of Organization.

hughMcLeodCompanyHierarchy

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A Brewing Storm in Psychology

October 2, 2009 By

For several months now, I’ve been noticing a distinct pattern in psychology-beat reporting in major sources of commentary like the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly and the New York Times. I sense that something really big is brewing in psychology. Big enough to deserve the overused phrase “paradigm shift.” Some of the more obvious elements are a renewed focus on longitudinal studies, narrative analysis, and the impact of social network approaches. But overall, I haven’t been able to put the whole picture together, so I thought I’d share a bunch of (excellent) articles that highlight important aspects of what is going on, as well as my preliminary conclusions. This should make for good weekend reading: many of the pieces I am linking to below are in-depth multi-page pieces.  It’ll take me probably another 3-4 months of simmering before I can figure this picture out, but maybe you can beat me to it or help me get there faster.

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The Tao of Frogger

September 28, 2009 By

Remember Frogger? The classic video game that inspired a memorable Seinfeld episode? It struck me that the game illustrates the difference between working smart and various flavors of working stupid. So here is one of my world-renowned cartoon philosophy illustrations (haven’t done one in a while).  Of course, the full-blow version also has crocodiles, turtles and a busy highway, but let’s keep it simple.

frogger

The Allegory of the Stage

September 23, 2009 By

Have you ever taken a deep breath and stepped out on a stage of some sort to perform? Time  slows down. Sounds quiet down and you can actually hear the thudding of your heart. And then, just as suddenly, as your performance starts, your acute sense of self-consciousness is forced to recede. Time speeds back up and the audio gets turned up again.  You are left with a hallucination-like memory of that moment of transition. This experience, which I call the “trigger moment”  is at the heart of the allegory of the stage.

spotlight

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Your Evil Twins and How to Find Them

September 17, 2009 By

Recently a reader emailed me a note: “I just wanted to bring to your radar ‘the pleasures and sorrows of work’ by Alain de Botton, and what you thought of its theses.” Now de Botton (The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, The Consolations of Philosophy, How Proust Can Change Your Life) has been on my radar for a while. I had browsed his books at Barnes and Noble a few times, but always put them down due to strange, sick feelings in my stomach. Thanks to this reader’s gentle nudge, I finally caved and read the first of the three, and managed to figure out why de Botton’s books had made me viscerally uncomfortable at first glance: he is my evil twin. An evil twin is defined as somebody who thinks exactly like you in most ways, but differs in just a few critical ways that end up making all the difference. Think the Batman and the Joker. Here’s why evil twins matter, and how to discover yours.

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