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

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.

Toy Guns is the vocabulary of empty machismo.

Sociopathy is not about ripping off a specific mask from the face of social reality. It is about recognizing that there are no social realities. There are only masks. Social realities exist as a hierarchy of increasingly sophisticated and specialized fictions for those predisposed to believe that there is something special about the human condition

Small minds discuss people, average minds discuss events, great minds discuss ideas. And in Jamesian solitude, Sociopaths find ideas contending in their minds. The creative destruction they script in the world of Losers and Clueless is mirrored by a creative destruction in their minds. This process creates power, but destroys meaning, especially th

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.

Literacy of any sort gives you the power to recognize and unambiguously label things that the illiterate can easily ignore as noise, fads and bullshit. This power can have very unpredictable effects. You may find yourself wishing, if you choose to acquire it, that you hadn’t. So acquiring organizational literacy is what some like to call a memetic

Groups must remain socially fluid to work. Fluidity is the other side of illegibility.

Idealized organizations are not perfect. They are perfectly pathological. So while most most management literature is about striving relentlessly towards an ideal by executing organization theories completely, this school, which I’ll call the Whyte school, would recommend that you do the bare minimum organizing to prevent chaos, and then stop. Let

Most forms of humor attempt to raise or lower status of individuals via game-like structures, with defined roles and a structurally predictable script (the surprise comes from the content). There is always a jokester, a victim (which can be the same person by design or accident) and crucially, an audience. The victim may or may not be present. So t