Improvised Corporate Asshole

I've been listening to the book Impro by Keith Johnstone. Somewhere I read that it's on Palantir's new employee reading list, which made me interested. The section on status is both weird and intriguing. It's very prescriptive - there's no "it depends." People love this book: it has 4.3 stars on Goodreads. That enthusiasm and its place on at least one corporate reading list makes the book's chapter on "status" weird and troubling.

I haven't delved into the other chapters yet—I skipped the biographical first chapter. Perhaps things go different in those sections. I haven't gotten to it yet, but it sounds like the whole "yes, and..." concept is covered extensibly, maybe even comes from this book.

Mastering People

In the status chapter, the basic idea is that any two humans are constantly establishing their relative status and then either battling over that status, or acting according to the pecking order: who's the master, who's the servant?

"Status" in this context is about who gets to command whom and who fears whom.

The high-status person commands others and is feared by low-status people. One acting exercise involves high-status characters eliminating an endless stream of subordinates for minor, even unknown offenses. The high-status person is essentially a bully.

The low-status person does whatever the higher-status individual wants and often fears them. This dynamic results in all sorts of comedy based on absurd situations. A low-status person attempts a robbery at a store but, after interacting with a high-status clerk, ends up taking only a few cents from the till. A low-status person is used as a chair, treated as furniture—an object.

That's the lesson of the status chapter: always know who has the power and who has to obey.  Are you resting on a chair, or are you the chair?

Once you establish those dynamics, you can create comedy by introducing unexpected twists and turns into that mechanic.

Also, the act of people battling for status can be entertaining once you remove the cushion of civility. There are many sections in the book where people throw crude insults back and forth at each other. Since the book is from the 1970s, these insults are more amusing for their quaintness than their shock value.

So, sure: comedy is often about uncomfortable or messed-up things. If it weren't, it'd all just be dad jokes, puns, and complaints about airplane food.

Off Stage

When reading this book, I suspect tech people are less interested in actually doing theater—let alone improv—and are more interested in understanding and engineering social situations. You can read this book not as a manual for the stage, but for how to act off-stage, in real life.

This is especially true if you're a technical person who's not familiar with the nuances of human interactions, and part of your job involves interacting with people all week. That is, on-site consultants working on difficult tech projects. What makes these projects difficult is that the people in the organization can't do them, often because of political battles and turf wars, because of status.

Here's a former Palentir person writing up why Impro is useful in this situation:

Being a successful FDE [on-site consultant] required an unusual sensitivity to social context – what you really had to do was partner with your corporate (or government) counterparts at the highest level and gain their trust, which often required playing political games. Impro is popular with nerds partly because it breaks down social behavior mechanistically. The vocabulary of the company was saturated with Impro-isms – ‘casting’ is an example. Johnstone discusses how the same actor can play ‘high status’ or ‘low status’ just by changing parts of their physical behavior – for example, keeping your head still while talking is high status, whereas moving your head side to side a lot is low status. Standing tall with your hands showing is high status, slouching with your hands in your pocket is low status. And so on. If you didn’t know all this, you were unlikely to succeed in a customer environment. Which meant you were unlikely to integrate customer data or get people to use your software. Which meant failure. A project to unify data silos to finally break down barriers is often seen as a project to take status away from each of those silos. The DBAs don't want to give you free, unrestricted access to the regional supply chain data because then, why are they getting paid so much? What status do they have if you never have to ask them for anything?

Management consulting is, potentially, an even darker version. Management consultants are brought in to fix an organization. The expectation is that they'll tell management exactly what to do to increase their share price—or whatever metric matters. Two common recommendations are to reorganize and/or to fire people. In most cases, then, management consultants are a threat to employees.

In both the on-site tech consultant and management consultant cases, they rely on the existing employees to do their job. The tech consultant needs access to the databases. The management consultant needs to know "how things are actually done around here" and what's not working well.

Both of these consultants have power in their relationship with the employees. They were sent by the bosses to fix things. After the consultant leave, they will still have a job, and likely a high-paying one. But if the consultants act like they have the power, most employees will not be helpful.

In those situations, you need to know how to work with people—not only in a genuine, truth-seeking way but sometimes by navigating complex social dynamics. You need to some social engineering.

If you didn't know how to talk with and work with people, you'd find an interesting framework in the status section of Impro. It'd be based on manipulation and undermining. You'd learn a framework for manipulating human interactions. You might play the subservient person to get the client overconfident and cooperative. Or, when you know you have power in a situation—you would have tools to assert it.

Just knowing that there is a social game you can play is a tremendous tool to discover, especially when you're a young, inexperienced tech person.

This is where the troubling part of the book comes in. It has no moral judgments about this constant power-playing. In fact, it seems to celebrate the "I'm sorry you can't take a joke" worldview. "Oh, I wasn't actually saying you were a boot-licking subordinate who should be disregarded—it's just improv! Hahaha!"

"I'm sorry you can't take a joke." Indeed. If you want to play the status game, the only response to that is always, "I can, but that wasn't one." 

Have you ever worked for this boss?

Off stage, the behavior and world-view in the book is definitely not a joke. If you read it and think "ah, this is something I can apply in real life!" you're going down a shitty path. For example, here's a list of rules of status quoted in a review:

'Ten golden rules' for people who are Number Ones. He says, 'They apply to all leaders, from baboons to modern presidents and prime ministers.' They are:

1. You must clearly display the trappings, postures and gestures of dominance.

2. In moments of active rivalry you must threaten your subordinates aggressively.

3. In moments of physical challenge you (or your delegates) must be able forcibly to overpower your subordinates.

4. If a challenge involves brain rather than brawn you must be able to outwit your subordinates.

5. You must suppress squabbles that break out between your subordinates.

6. You must reward your immediate subordinates by permitting them to enjoy the benefits of high ranks.

7. You must protect the weaker members of the group from undue persecution.1

8. You must make decisions concerning the social activities of your group.

9. You must reassure your extreme subordinates from time to time.

10. You must take the initiative in repelling threats or attacks arising from outside your group.

This is a manual for caustic corporate life and the types of terrible management structures we've been trying to fix for the past few decades. Just imagine how someone who was reading this to use in real life would be as a co-worker, a boss, or worse a "rival" in another group.

If you see someone reading this book, ask them, "Are you an actor?" And if they say no, be cautious. You'll next need to ask them, "Are you reading this book so that you know how people work and to work with people, or so that you know how to avoid being an asshole?"

The theater part of the book is telling you how use status games to construct interesting and fun theatrical systems. Art and simple and just stupid-as-good entertainment would be terrible tension, misery, bullies, evil, and ass-hattery. It'd be like reading greeting cards as your only source of entertainment.

Corporate life is not art, or even popcorn-entertainment. If you read this chapter on status as how to use status games at work to get things done, you're contributing to a shitty corporate culture. Things like those ten golden rules should be read as the complete opposite: if you're running your organization like this, you're an asshole that's making life worse for all of us. Would anyone want to work with a person like that, or for them?

In other words, the status section is a great manual for understanding and navigating the next four years where I'm sure a lot of people will be saying "oh, I'm sorry you can't take a joke."

Relative to your interests

• Top 5 Intelligent App Delivery Challenges and How Executives Can Solve Them - AI middleware.

• Gartner Says CIOs Need to Overcome Four Emerging Challenges to Deliver Value With AI - Make sure you cap AI spend in the next few years of messing around with enterprise AI. // Also, new tech burger-stack: “As CIO, your job is to design a tech sandwich that can handle the messiness of AI”

• Gartner Survey Reveals Only 48% of Digital Initiatives Are Successful - “On average, only 48% of digital initiatives meet or exceed business outcome targets, according to Gartner, Inc.’s annual global survey of more than 3,100 CIOs and technology executives, and more than 1,100 executive leaders outside of IT (CxOs).”

• Gartner Forecasts IT Spending in Europe to Grow 8.7% in 2025 - “Europe has seen a remarkable 46% increase in server spending by technology providers in 2024. In 2025, technology companies will continue building out the infrastructure needed for training GenAI models today and inferencing them in the future.”

• VMware Explore - private cloud is the best way to manage AI and security concerns - “We are serious people. We’re here to help you run your business better. We’re not here to show and sell you bright, shiny objects.”

• Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2024 Barcelona: Day 2 Highlights - "53% of banking CIOs and technology leaders reported their firm was meeting expectations on GenAI initiatives. Only 6% exceeded expectations.

• The Birth and Continuing Evolution of Platform Engineering - The Humanitec really have it out for DevOps: “But a drawback of DevOps is that it cannot be scaled beyond about 50 developers before it begins tripping over itself and becomes difficult to manage. With that serious shortcoming, platform engineering and its strengths and flexibility was gaining more attention in the marketplace.”

Wastebook

• ”It is officially synergy-o-clock.” Here.

• “Everyone Everywhere Out To Lunch.” Taylor.

• “disappointed optimist.” Just in from Iceland.

• “Where to find a.m. drinking spots in the city.” Right on time.

• “Hand painted artsy font.” A font.

• “Changing lightbulbs in the rain.” Rodrick

• “Native in the platform.”

• Is it a real thing that it’s better to use short videos for internal training over text? You know, like in that Mr Beast memo?

Conferences

GoTech World, speaking, Bucharest, Nov 12th and 13th. SREday Amsterdam, speaking, Nov 21st, 2024.

Discounts! SREDay Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. I won’t be at KubeCon US this year, but my work has a 20% off discount code you can use for registration: KCNA24VMWQR20.

Logoff

I’m back from Explore in Barcelona. I can especially tell, now, that it’s getting colder in Amsterdam.

//

Here is some advice about reading Americans that I gave a European friend this week. This friend was talking with an American about how their company should improve.

I met up with my European friend afterwards, and they said, “I couldn’t tell if they were taking me seriously.”

“Ah,” I said, “they were probably smiling and nodding their head as you talked, huh?”

“Exactly,” my friend said, “they seemed to be agreeing, but I couldn’t tell if they were listening to me and understanding.”

“Yes, well: they were American,” I said, “Worse: California tech American.”

“Yes!”

“Well,” I began, “here is the three step filter for seeing if an American is actually listening and maybe even agreeing with you:”

1. If they are smiling and nodding, this means absolutely nothing. And, in fact, it might mean they are totally not listening to you.

2. If they start asking you questions in return, this is encouraging, but still does not mean they are understanding or taking you seriously. “Oh, really? Why do you think Widget XYZ needs more tongs?” or “Ah, and what do you think we should do?” That last question is an especially bad indication: they’re probably just asking that to get you to talk more with the hopes that you’ll just get it out of your system with and walk away.

3. If the American start making statements, then they’re listening and may even be taking you seriously. The best is to have them repeat what you said back to you:“so what you’re saying is…” or “I hadn’t considered that, here’s what I think we should do…” or even “I don’t agree, and let me tell you why…”2

“Hmmm,” my friend said. (Which is almost the European version of an American smiling and nodding, but I know them well enough…)

“Oh, also,” I said, “have you ever heard of the American-corporate phrase ‘smile fucking’?”

“No, never” my friend said, “but, now, I know exactly what it means.”