The Gervais Principle: The Complete Series, with a Bonus Essay on Office Space (Ribbonfarm Roughs Book 2)

Another way to understand the difference between Powertalk and the other languages is with a card-playing analogy. In Powertalk, you play with valuable currency, usually reality-information. In the other languages, you are playing with no stakes. The most important enabling factor in being able to speak Powertalk is simply the possession of table s

Which brings us to our main idea – how both the pyramid and its lifecycle are animated. The dynamics are governed by the Newton’s Law of organizations: The Gervais Principle. The Gervais Principle and Its Consequences The Gervais Principle is this: Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing Losers into middle-managem

Toy Guns is the vocabulary of empty machismo.

the depth of any transaction is limited by the depth of the shallower party.

But there is a cost to getting organizationally literate. This ability, once acquired, cannot be un-acquired. Just as learning a foreign language makes you deaf to the raw, unintelligible sound of that language you could once experience, learning to read organizations means you can never see them the way you used to, before.

Here is the non-trivial stuff, compressed into three handy laws: Your development is arrested by your strengths, not your weaknesses. Arrested-development behavior is caused by a strength-based addiction. The mediocre develop faster than either the talented or the untalented. An alternative way of looking at these three laws is to note that defense

What I actually set out to do was understand why a television show was funny. I found answers that satisfied me by looking back at my own work history. And accidentally created a mirror for those wishing to reflect upon their work and life.

These then are the developmental psychology roots of the Gervais Principle. Recall that Cluelessness goes with overperformance. That overperformance is caused by arrested development around a strength, which has been hooked by an addictive environment of social rewards. Mediocrity is your best defense against addiction, and guarantor of further ope

Exits work the same way. If an alpha or omega leaves, the new alpha or omega is plucked out of the illegible middle at that time. Not before. Succession planning may be a good idea in formal hierarchies, but it is a bad idea in social groups.