Corporate World, Business Humour and Losers

‘An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen’.—The Peter Principle

Work, drudgery, routine, appraisals, promotions, jealousy, mistrust, suspicion, scheming, manipulation, trials and tribulations, See I told you before, I don’t care, you will do as I say because I am your boss, POLITICS! These are typical phrase. We think we have WON, because we have come out of a so called stifling atmosphere and walk into another place that initially seems to have an open atmosphere, that quickly emerges to be stifling. Some stick around and get rewarded for loyalty (sic) and not ability, and those who get awarded for ability have the luxury of not being loyal, for they will be in demand.

We love to blame our bosses or authorities or organizations for the culture, work atmosphere, paper work, systems, process, procedures and so on. Yet there is something called a hierarchy in organizations, despite the fact that most of them want to claim that they have a flat structure. All of us aspire to be at the top, and why not, because we have all been trained to think line leaders, like winners.

Three Books on Business Humour may make you think otherwise

Laurence Peter gave the management world a great phrase – Peter’s Principle! He authored a book too, in which he propounded that all employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence within an organisation, at which point it is too late to move them down or sideways.

Managers reach their level of incompetence by being promoted until they fail to do well in their current job. The message for employees unsuccessfully seeking promotion, then, is that they may be at their level of incompetence already. The final promotion, the one that takes each individual from a level of competence to a level of incompetence, should not, however, be taken as inevitable.

He has classified failure into two kinds: those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought. Fortune knocks once, but misfortune will try again and again. There are two sorts of losers—the good loser, and the other one who can’t act. Our focus is obviously on the good loser, and not the other kind, and hence another justification for the title of the book itself.

Another one is about Parkinsons Law, that says Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. As a result, companies grow without thinking of how much they are producing. Even if growth in numbers doesn’t make them more money, companies grow and people become busier and busier. This comically exposes bureaucracy (bosses) for tortuous administration (systems) and the pointless shuffling of paper (documentation). Look at it closely and you will find that it is not difficult to detect incompetence in organisations; many people have cause to complain about it not only in their working lives but in their daily lives as well.

Scott Adams and his Dilbert cartoon focus on themes of failure, incompetence and fear of being caught failing or being incompetent. How positive?

Is success directly proportional to winning?, then everyone who is promoted is successful, and if so, he follows the peters principle, and rises to his own levels of incompetence (loser).