Ironically the original Office, featuring Ricky Gervais, has a much better and more nuanced implicit theory of management than this.
Brent (Gervais) is neither a sociopath nor the top dog he thinks he is, he's a middle manager who it's implied was legitimately good at sales, but is not at all good at the role he's been promoted into because it's a completely different one.
The actual upper management, sociopathic or not, are certainly not scouring the underlings for underperforming sociopaths phoning it in to promote (imagine Keith being promoted!), and are actually more interested in making them redundant to make efficiency savings. We don't see senior management at all, they don't see most of the employees at all and they clearly don't have much idea what's going on, initially considering promoting Brent (because he applies for it and can bluff his way through an interview) but then in the second season bringing in Neil to oversee him and get rid of him (because they've started paying attention). Neil is obviously more socially adept which is probably why he's been promoted higher at a younger age, but he also appears to be actually good at his job. On the other hand, Gareth whose career appears to have topped out at assistant to the Regional Manager, ends up getting Brent's middle management job though he has zero social skills and actually liked the guy whose seat he takes, because he wants it, he grafts and he's there. Most of the others in the office neither work particularly hard nor particularly care for seeking promotion. And it's a paper company, they don't exactly have many ways to identify high performers anyway and the really ambitious and talented people are elsewhere.
(We don't see the people at the top at all, but they probably went to the right school, started in middle management somewhere else and hopped jobs adding bullet points of performance they can claim credit for to their CV until they got C-suite titles and compensation)
> Brent (Gervais) is neither a sociopath nor the top dog he thinks he is, he's a middle manager who it's implied was legitimately good at sales, but is not at all good at the role he's been promoted into because it's a completely different one.
I think in this hierarchy Brent is supposed to be Clueless rather than Sociopath.
I agree it doesn't 100% match the characters.
By the way, I like Steve Carell but the British show was much better than the US one.
It also gets RHLFed into it by people who think the "better" sentence is the one with more puffery, and crucially it tries to cram the semantic patterns in whether appropriate or not because it's been trained to write in ways which aren't perceived as bland.
Puffery about "rich cultural heritage, a "tapestry" of sights "from the Colosseum to the Pantheon" and how they "serve as potent symbols" probably is better writing than "Rome is a city in the Lazio region of Italy with a population of 4m. It is the capital of Italy". Doesn't work quite so well when its trying to fit the pattern to the two competing diners of Bumfuck, Ohio and how the rich cultural heritage of its municipal library underscores its status as the third largest city in its county.
yeah, this is frankly isn't really showing what people think it's showing. The "not bullshit" examples are all manager-speak and coded phrases like
"We plan to right-size our manufacturing operations to align to the new
strategy and take advantage of integration opportunities."
What the study actually shows is that less skilled people find it harder to distinguish this sort of way of saying jobs are being lost or puffery about "we have permission from the market to be a world class, tier one partner" from generated manager speak that's incoherent or mixes the metaphors up like "covering all bases of the low hanging fruit" or "drilling down one more click on people"). Probably because those less skilled people have poorer reading comprehension in general and typically less exposure to corporate environments.
Or that those “nonsense” phrases are not actually nonsense when spoken by a manager.
The conclusion they’re nonsense comes from the random generation and the technical perspective on semantics; but it’s entirely possible they’re generating phrases that do have semantic meaning when said by a manager… and hence their whole study is flawed.
They quietly assume their conclusion, when assuming their generated phrases are vacuous rather than contain coded semantic content.
Jesus bro it looks like shit, it smells like shit, it has the same texture – it is shit, you can’t convince me it is a chocolate. The purpose of the corpo speak is to inflate manager ego and fool smooth brains.
Yeah. Feels kind of insignificant considering the amount of non-humanoid robots they've used on production lines for the last few decades and lack of any claims to be "fully autonomous" or for the humanoid robots to be performing particularly advanced tasks
Corporatism/corporatocracy is about representative groups from industries being embedded in the state and their interests shaping state policy.
The current US administration's relationships with corporations is more seeking to maximise how much bribe money it can extract from them, whilst undermining them with counterproductive policies no matter how big the tax breaks are.
Sure, but the reality is that the United States where these companies are headquartered currently has the exact opposite policy: Anthropic has been blacklisted by the DoW (and replaced by OpenAI) because the US administration thought that the very limited amount of self-regulation Anthropic insisted on was going too far.
Scales well enough for being a manufacturer with robust sales (let's ignore the daft share price a moment), and Tesla were ideally placed to capitalise on being the brand name in EVs until Elon decided to torch the brand equity, particularly with the demographics most likely to buy brand new EVs...
I'm now imagining a situation in which a customer at the point of successfully making an insurance claim to pay for the nice new clothes they've bought themselves is infuriated to receive an email informing them that Kansai airport has found their luggage and will endeavour to deliver it to a hotel anywhere within the world within two days...
The customer has presumably been paid. If they're smart there's nothing or very little in the suitcase that can't just be replaced. The airline/insurance has paid out and just wants the claim to go away.
As a side-note, had a small kitchen fire with smoke damage last year and it was pretty obvious that, even though they were reasonably generous, the insurance adjuster, cleaning people, movers, etc. just wanted the whole process to go away so they could move on. They objected a bit to a few claims but, for the most part, spending $50K was nothing compared to the claims being reopened.
Once the insurance adjuster is satisfied that you're not scamming them, they're often quite flexible and lenient.
I've only ever had luggage delayed once, they gave me a little bag of toiletries and a couple hundred bucks and a few days later delivered the luggage; never demanded the money back.
I've had luggage delayed many times relative to the amount I actually check luggage.
There were a few insurance policy things that my adjuster pushed back on (no code upgrades) and there were a number of things that would have just been silly for me not to pay for when walls were being repaintedd and opened up. There was a fire inspector because of the size of the claim. But it was pretty reasonable overall--although of people wouldn't have had the available cash to do the whole job as it really needed o be done. And, given that a couple of contractors, saved my butt in the middle of the winter, I wasn't going to push back too hard.
Brent (Gervais) is neither a sociopath nor the top dog he thinks he is, he's a middle manager who it's implied was legitimately good at sales, but is not at all good at the role he's been promoted into because it's a completely different one.
The actual upper management, sociopathic or not, are certainly not scouring the underlings for underperforming sociopaths phoning it in to promote (imagine Keith being promoted!), and are actually more interested in making them redundant to make efficiency savings. We don't see senior management at all, they don't see most of the employees at all and they clearly don't have much idea what's going on, initially considering promoting Brent (because he applies for it and can bluff his way through an interview) but then in the second season bringing in Neil to oversee him and get rid of him (because they've started paying attention). Neil is obviously more socially adept which is probably why he's been promoted higher at a younger age, but he also appears to be actually good at his job. On the other hand, Gareth whose career appears to have topped out at assistant to the Regional Manager, ends up getting Brent's middle management job though he has zero social skills and actually liked the guy whose seat he takes, because he wants it, he grafts and he's there. Most of the others in the office neither work particularly hard nor particularly care for seeking promotion. And it's a paper company, they don't exactly have many ways to identify high performers anyway and the really ambitious and talented people are elsewhere.
(We don't see the people at the top at all, but they probably went to the right school, started in middle management somewhere else and hopped jobs adding bullet points of performance they can claim credit for to their CV until they got C-suite titles and compensation)
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