Dilbert, Office Space, The Office and countless lesser known films and shows all portray the modern corporate work environment as a place where disinterested drones toil away under the constant supervision of micromanaging middle managers of questionable competency and intelligence. But when and how did this meme come about? Certainly people have always complained about their jobs or their boss since the beginning of time. It seems like its only been in the past couple of decades where working in Corporate America has become synonymous with mediocrity, inneptitude and comidic levels of idocy.
It’s like this - a decision that anyone else makes that is contrary to what you would decide is idiotic. Since your boss probably has information that you do not, your view of his decision is tainted by the missing information hence to you he often looks like an idiot.
Since this condition is fairly common it has migrated into our entertainment media and allows us all to laugh at the fact that it happens to others and it’s not just us who is managed by morons.
The reality of course is that its more often perception thats the problem than your boss but that doesn’t make us feel better like laughing at Dilbert does.
One possibility is that in the past, it was mostly intelligent people who got into white-collar office jobs. The others stayed in blue-collar jobs or in rural jobs.
As society changed and more and more people moved into white-collar jobs, the average IQ and the competency of the workplace went down, thus causing, to a degree, the phenomenon which you see parodied in movies and TV.
I have no cites for the above, just a WAG.
The white collar sector of the economy has gotten a lot bigger over the past 30-40 years. People are in it now who wouldn’t have made the cut back then, so that could have an effect.
I strongly suspect it also has to do with the super-sizing of corporations.
In general, these problems (managerial incompetence, the ‘Peter Principle’, etc.) are more easily hidden from the people who would truly care about such (i.e., those whom such incompetence would actually cost money - owners, stockholders) in a large corporation with many, many layers of management than in a small company with the owner on site every day.
No, the idea that corporations are packed with suck-ups and idiots is not a new one:
The Peter Principle (1969)
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1952)
What about the “Dunning-Kruger Effect”, alongside the “Peter Principle”? The “failure to recognise skill in others” bit especially?
I’m referring to people assessing the competence of their managers, not managers assessing the competence of their subordinates (although that is probably prevalent too).
I blame (at least the more recent iteration of this) on two things:
[ol]
[li]In the 80s, the idea originated that there are management skills that are independent of the industry you are working in. E.g. at some level the work of a manager of a toilet paper company and that of a manager of an accounting firm have more in common with each other than they do with the work of either of their underlings. Hiring decisions for managers started to follow this logic and you ended up with a lot of managers who were completely inexperienced in the actual thing their company does. From the point of view of a peon, the boss was no longer someone who started where you are and worked his way up to where he is now, but someone with a completely separate career path.[/li][li]In the 90s a whole bunch of highly-skilled but low-level workers (basically computer people) entered the work force. Managers had no experience at all in the kind of work that was being done, and could not participate at all in the technical decision-making that is important to those lines of work.[/li][/ol]
I wonder if this has something to do with it. Companies these days have a much more labyrinthian management structure. For example, I am an independent consultant who works as a project manager on a team of project managers that is assigned (dotted line style) on and as-needed basis to various sub groups within a larger department whose purpose is to provide business analytics services to other departments in a subsidary of a large financial services company.
Another possibility is that in the past several decades, technology has made the pace of business so much faster that it has become more obvious when people make bad decisions. And there are more decisions that need to be made more quickly. 40 years ago, when a VP wanted something done, he had to have his secretary type up a memo and circulate it to the group. Changes were slow to come and people had plenty of time to adjust to them. Now I get a hundred emails a day from my six boxess giving me conflicting demands.
It is more about the growth of entertainment and freedom of speech. People have always hated their bosses. They have always felt they know more and work harder than them.
Sure you had writers like Dickens telling the plight of the working man, but in a lot of ways people dare not speak up against the man or system. After the 60s and the Baby Boomers, speaking against the man became the rule, not the exception.
Shows like Mad Men are a stark contrast to the last 30 years of this. They sort of glorify that day when “The Man” was still top of the food chain… Not the stumbling buffoons like Michael from The Office.
I think a LOT of this started in the mid-Seventies.
Prior to that, there were undoubtedly people who hated Big Business, but hardly any who thought the captains of the Fortune 500 were idiots who didn’t know what they were doing. When I was a kid, “MADE IN THE USA” was synonymous with quality, while “MADE IN JAPAN” meant “This is a cheap piece of junk.”
In the Mid-Seventies,that all changed. The oil shortages led millions of Americans to start buying Japanese cars… and, mirabile dictu, it turned out that Datsuns and Toyotas were a lot BETTER built and more reliable than the American cars they’d been used to. For the first time, Americans started to look at our big domestic corporations and think, “Those idiots have been selling us overpriced, badly designed crap.”
From then on, it became easier and easier to believe that “Japanese business leaders are geniuses; OURS are morons.”
I don’t know how far back this goes, but it was apparent in the satire of the Marx Bros. and the Stooges. I assume it goes back even further.
There’s a reason for that. I’ve read, although cannot cite easily, that tariff structures in the post-WWII trade rewarded the Japanese for production of inexpensive goods without regard to quality and japanese manufacturers responded accordingly.
That change didn’t just happen – it was intentional – and is largely attributed to one man.
They had. Also quite intentionally.
I think when you have a smarter, more technical workforce, it’s a lot easier to tell when your manager appears to do nothing besides try to report on and document work they don’t really understand.
What do you mean by understand? If you mean understand on a detailed level, I’d say a manager who does that is wasting his time and not really managing. If you mean at a high level either you have a really stupid manager (it happens) or you have workers unable to explain it. A good manager needs to trust his reports to do good coding, say, without him reading the code, even if he can.
I’ve observed that a lot of so-called bad decisions are being made based on factors the worker does not see. Say a division is losing money. A worker may really, really want a new piece of equipment, but is unlikely to get it unless it is really critical. He is not going to know about the financial problems, and so will think that the reason for not getting the equipment is management stupidity.
I hate fiction which shows someone in a high place as too stupid to tie his shoelaces, without giving some plausible way for the guy to get there. One of the great things about Discworld is that the big boss is really, really smart.
I think it’s a shift that’s a lot older than we’re giving it credit for. In the in early modern literature, it’s very rare to fid a boss who is an incompetent bumbler. The fools are all the servants. Somewhere, the assumptions reversed, and the idiot-boss and clever servant meme appeared, as in Bertie Wooster and Jeeves.
Word. I personally think a big bonus for this meme was some of the real boneheaded decisions that were made by Big Business.
Except the idiot master/clever slave trope goes back to Ancient Rome. In a lot of ways, ancient Rome was a lot more like modern times than the Medieval era. I think the Feudal system meant that if an aristocrat didn’t pull his weight his family would go under pretty quickly and his lands distributed to some up-and-comer.
If Sinclair Lewis didn’t base a novel on it, it probably wasn’t a strongly developed theme before WWII.
During the war, everyone was quickly thrown together in an imperfect organization, with incompetents and nincompoops on full display. Afterward, when people returned to civilian life, the couldn’t help but see the similarities.
It goes back long before that.
In the 1950’s there was a mindless, soulless boss in The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit and Al Capp’s merciless lampooning of business with General Bullmoose, J. Roaringham Fatback and J. Colossal McGenius.
Back in the 1930’s, in addition to TriPolar’s examples of the Marx Brothers and the Stooges, there was the incompetent Dagwood Bumstead and his petty tyrant boss J.C. Dithers (a storyline that has worked, unchanged, for 80 years!)
I’m sure I could find examples of buffoonish tycoons from the 1880’s if I looked long enough.