Office cul­ture is best under­stood through the lens of pop­u­lar cul­ture. That’s why Office Space and Dil­bert are so popular.

The Office is another one of those sem­i­nal “texts”* on office life.

A blog­ger named Venkatesh Rao has combed through the Office and diluted from it a new “prin­ci­ple” to super­sede the Dil­bert Prin­ci­ple when it comes to our under­stand­ing of office life.

He breaks office employ­ees down into three cat­e­gories — the sociopath, the clue­less, and the loser.

Below is an extended quote from his first post. He fol­lowed it up with a sec­ond. Check them out.

The Ger­vais Prin­ci­ple is this:

Sociopaths, in their own best inter­ests, know­ingly pro­mote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the aver­age bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves.

The Ger­vais prin­ci­ple dif­fers from the Peter Prin­ci­ple, which it super­fi­cially resem­bles. The Peter Prin­ci­ple states that all peo­ple are pro­moted to the level of their incom­pe­tence. It is based on the assump­tion that future pro­mo­tions are based on past per­for­mance. The Peter Prin­ci­ple is wrong for the sim­ple rea­son that exec­u­tives aren’t that stu­pid, and because there isn’t that much room in an upward-narrowing pyra­mid. They know what it takes for a pro­mo­tion can­di­date to per­form at the “to” level. So if they are pro­mot­ing peo­ple beyond their com­pe­tence any­way, under con­di­tions of oppor­tu­nity scarcity, there must be a good reason.

Scott Adams, see­ing a dif­fer­ent flaw in the Peter Prin­ci­ple, pro­posed the Dil­bert Prin­ci­ple: that com­pa­nies tend to sys­tem­at­i­cally pro­mote their least-competent employ­ees to mid­dle man­age­ment to limit the dam­age they can do. This again is untrue. The Ger­vais prin­ci­ple pre­dicts the exact oppo­site: that the most com­pe­tent ones will be pro­moted to mid­dle man­age­ment. Michael Scott was a star sales­man before he become a clue­less mid­dle man­ager. The least com­pe­tent employ­ees (but not all of them — only cer­tain enlight­ened incom­pe­tents) will be pro­moted not to mid­dle man­age­ment, but fast-tracked through to senior man­age­ment. To the sociopath level.

And in case you are won­der­ing, the unen­light­ened under-performers get fired.

*Because thanks to my arts degree (or QUT equiv­a­lent) I know that every­thing is a “text”…

Author: Nathan Campbell

Nathan runs St Eutychus. He is currently a student at the Queensland Theological College. In a previous professional life he worked in public relations for an economic development and tourism marketing organisation. He is married to Robyn. He likes coffee and the internet.

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