Can you choose not to play? Yes, if you find a group of people whose locked-status patterns are complementary to yours (either via co-dependent game-playing patterns or more productive patterns), and stay within that group, and within a small universe of situations, as much as you can. If your life involves constantly meeting all sorts of new people, in unfamiliar situations, and getting all sorts of different things from them, you don’t have a choice. Play status or crash. Even if you aren’t being played yourself, the mere randomness of complementary/toxic status collisions with a changing cast of locked-status people will eventually make you crash. The unmanaged, baseline “complementary” hit rate will be too low.
Hope that’s enough to get you started, for those of you who needed this primer. One warning. If you decide to go down this path, there is no turning back. Once your status firmware starts to shrivel, you can’t easily re-invigorate it. Being a status-player is also not an easy thing to hide in the long term, so you will be known for what you are, by people you interact with a lot. The best way to manage this perception is to openly acknowledge it and make sure your underlying values are understood and accepted by others. If you don’t make that clear, you’ll end up being viewed as an opportunistic, two-faced politician, and that perception is highly dangerous. Project your values clearly, and you’ll come across as “worldly wise,” a much safer perception.
Should You Show Your True Colors?
There are two types of movie villains, the kind that starts out obviously evil from minute one, and the bad guy who “shows his true colors” at some pivotal scene. Even if you are only slightly evil, you need to pick one of these two styles; obvious wolf, or wolf in sheep’s clothing? I recommend “obvious wolf,” but done intelligently. Pretending to be all sweet and nice usually backfires badly in the long term, because long-term acting is hard, painful and ultimately pointless, and when you are unmasked (as you ultimately will be), the repercussions are awful, even if your unmasked character isn’t particularly bad. The mere fact that you put on a show is a hanging crime, socially. But if you are afraid that “showing your true colors” limits your influence, you are mistaken. Done right, it actually amplifies influence. Here’s a little story (possibly apocryphal) I once heard, that illustrates the point.
On the sets of The Hunt for Red October one day, Sean Connery lost it. He exploded at some unfortunate stage hand for a trivial reason; the whole unit was on edge. That’s when they shot the scene when Sean Connery’s character first strides onto the command deck. All the other actors tensed up. Connery himself was calm and relaxed.
Sean Connery actually lost his temper on purpose. That way he got the other actors to act in a way that made his presence seem a lot more commanding. At some point, you too have probably been around someone influential who is known to have an explosive temper. Everyone walks around on eggshells, people watch what they say, and there is tension in the air.
Now, I don’t know if that story is true, but I’ve seen enough similar episodes in real life to extract a general lesson. To wield influence, it pays to appear predictable in very simple ways around others. Fly your true colors high. For most of us on the slightly evil path, this is a counterintuitive idea. We’ve all learned, through observation and practice, that it pays to be either a low reactor, or that it pays to become whatever the situation demands, like the boggarts in Harry Potter novels. Expressing “your true self” is for naive, self-absorbed and self-indulgent idiots, right?
Not quite. Trying to be yourself and expressing your true personality in every situation certainly is a very adolescent thing to do. Expressing yourself completely is downright childish. That amounts to publishing all your buttons for anybody to push. But if you identify the right, simple subset of your most natural behaviors, and become very predictable to specific groups of people, you will be vastly more effective. What kind of behaviors should you deliberately publish? The ones others are afraid of triggering. In other words, the only buttons worth publishing are the ones others are afraid to push. Publishing buttons that others want to push leads to being manipulated, flattered or worst of all, an invitation to a co-dependent, mutual-reward-button-pushing loop.
Temper is the most obvious one, but it is a pretty blunt instrument. You can also gain a reputation for predictably asking specific types of questions, such as “do you have data to back that up?” and a reputation for mercilessly skewering people who don’t respond the right way. Do it once or twice, and people get the message. So long as it is a self-aware kind of predictability, you will also be able to over-ride your own default published responses on occasion if necessary.
Small and Honest Moves
How do you know your car mechanic isn’t over-charging you? How do you know your doctor isn’t ordering unnecessary tests and procedures? Such situations are what economists call “principal-agent problems.” Basically, these are asymmetric situations where the party you are paying for a service is also the knowledgeable party who can determine what services are actually necessary, and how much to charge. The agent has a strong incentive to cheat the principal by padding the bills, either by doing, or pretending to do, unnecessary extra work. Such cheating is rife, especially in car repair. More than once I’ve doubtfully forked over money for work I suspected was unnecessary. Once, I actually caught an extra listed service, and when I pointed it out, the mechanic’s reaction made it clear that it wasn’t an accident. He blustered, but it was clear he’d tried padding the bill, assuming I was more ignorant than I actually was.
Much advice is often offered to principals on how to deal with the problem, but I’ll offer you a slightly evil tip: how to win the trust of a suspicious principal if you are an agent.
A month or so ago, my car developed a slow oil leak. Since I’d recently driven over a big rock that hit my under-carriage, I was worried there might some serious and expensive damage to my transmission. I mentioned the incident as a possible cause while dropping the car off, and I expect my anxiety over a potentially huge bill must have been evident. When it comes to car mechanics, I don’t bother with a poker face. After all, these guys get to read dozens of customer faces every day while you and I only dance with auto mechanics a couple of times a year.
To my pleasant surprise, when I picked up the car, the mechanic told me he was just charging me for an oil change. The problem was an old and cracked oil pan cap (if I remember his words correctly), a cheap part he replaced for free. So I got a $35 bill where I had mentally been preparing for something in the hundreds or thousands.
This is what I call a small, honest act. He could easily have met my anxious expectations and done unnecessary and expensive repairs.
In this case, I believe the small, honest act was part of an overall honest operation. But it immediately struck me that such moves can be used by an unscrupulous agent to lull a suspicious principal into a false sense of security. An agent can easily gain trust with small, honest moves, and then make out like a bandit later when a better opportunity presents itself.
Most uses of this tactic I can think of would be outright evil rather than slightly evil, so the main value in knowing the trick is to guard against it. But I suspect there are probably good slightly evil cases where you can use the tactic and still sleep at night. Especially if the principal is a jerk who deserves it. A fictional example is Andy DuFresne’s actions in the Shawshank Redemption. I won’t spoil it for you if you haven’t yet seen it.
The First Day in Prison
I hope you never do anything that sends you to prison, but there are interesting things to be learned from prison culture. One of my favorite prison ideas is the best known one: you should beat somebody up on your first day in prison. Otherwise, so prison-lore has it, things that happen to you will be even nastier than they need to be. Like many, I believe that all organizations are psychic prisons. Unlike most, I also believe that apparently open and non-institutional social systems or networks are also psychic prisons. There is a saying in the modern c
ult of happiness that “happiness is other people.” I’d add to that, “prison is other people.”
So you should expect to see some variant of the “beat somebody up on your first day” dynamic in most social contexts. Parties, blogosphere niches, Facebook groups, soccer games: every kind of social context has certain prison-like elements.
In regular workplaces, opportunities come up regularly because the moment you decide to do something significant, you’ll run into opposition.
There are three ways of dealing with opposition.
The recommended and stupid way is to directly engage it in a cooperative spirit. This never works unless there is genuinely some sort of misunderstanding that can be easily clarified. This is the well-known “death by consensus seeking” phenomenon where you try far too hard to make everybody happy and end up slowing down your effort to a glacial pace. You also burden it with so much crud put in to please others, it will likely die under the weight of unreasonable expectations if it ever gets through. Consensus-building has its place in the slightly evil playbook, but it is rarely a useful obstacle-avoidance technique.
The smart way is to acknowledge the reality of true conflict and judiciously decide, for each obstacle, whether to go through it or around it. Going through means confronting somebody openly and trying to either win them over to your side without conceding much in return, or getting a more powerful decision-maker to rule in your favor. Going around means picking from among your favorite slightly evil moves in the playbook, such as misdirection, distraction, pre-emptive neutralization before they know what you are up to, sidelining, flattery, stealth, divide-and-conquer, momentum judo (accelerating their efforts to failure rather than resisting them) and strategic leaks.
I almost never go through, and most effective people I’ve met also never go through. Going around is generally cheaper and less damaging.
But there is one situation where going through is useful, even if you would normally judge the situation to be a go-around situation. This is when you are new to a place. Plowing through an element of opposition demonstrates a willingness to fight when necessary, force of will and social intelligence in navigating status hierarchies. In other words, you have to make an example of some unfortunate opponent.
But this only works if you pick the right target and demonstrate “going around” behaviors and consensus-seeking behaviors in parallel (to show your competence at all the plays is to make sure you don’t get labeled a bull in the china shop who only knows how to go through).
This means you must generally pick on someone nominally bigger than you (older, bigger paycheck, nicer title, more successful track record) who isn’t particularly well-liked or connected. But not so much bigger that open conflict would be viewed as unhealthy for the organization, even if the specific target is viewed as deserving of a beat-down. In other words, you have to set up and win an underdog fight, where you’re not too much of an underdog. You must also anticipate and plan for neutralizing collateral damage, and make sure the right audience is watching. Be careful not to take on staff bureaucrats. “Going through” is almost never the right strategy when dealing with staff. You must pick somebody with line responsibilities.
Lastly, you shouldn’t be the one to start the fight. You should wait for an excuse, a legitimate provocation. Ideally you should pick as your excuse an instance of a pattern of behavior that everybody objects to already. Email is often the perfect medium for such skirmishes. So a good strategy is to wait for a provocation over email, and then produce a calibrated over-reaction. Be careful not to rope in the people you expect to act as judges on your side: you need to show such judges that you can handle confrontation unaided and that impressing them isn’t really the point.
And make sure you pick weapons you know how to use. Email is a good medium, but if you suck at email-fu and the art of delivering civil and understated surgical strikes with words, it would be very dumb indeed to pick email.
Following the Rules
Let’s steal an idea from the playbook of the labor movement: following the rules.
How much do you think depends on trust, initiative and good faith, for things to run smoothly in a business? Or to turn the question on its head, how intentionally evil do you actually have to be, to disrupt business operations? Do you need to break rules to mess things up?
Turns out, the answer is not even “slightly evil,” let alone “outright evil.” All you have to do is play by the rules. EXACTLY by the rules.
Playing exactly by the rules is a powerful form of industrial collective action known as “work to rule,”†† in which workers stick religiously to their job descriptions, defined policies and procedures. You don’t stop work. You don’t deliberately slow down. You don’t try extra-hard to be incompetent or make errors. You don’t even indulge in creative passive-aggressive obstruction.
You just follow the rules.
And as the history of the labor movement shows, it is often enough to bring things to a standstill.
The reason this works is that under normal circumstances, employers and employees alike conspire to maintain the fiction that a corporation is a set of defined, rational roles that are filled by people with acceptable levels of skill, executing rational policies and procedures that are sufficient to get things done and turn a profit.
In practice, nothing would ever get done if everybody did this. The rules aren’t a minimum definition of the profit-making business of a corporation. They are well below the minimum. Even disengaged minimum-effort types (“losers” in the Gervais Principle‡‡ sense) do more than this under normal circumstances.
The effectiveness of “work to rule” methods underlines the extent to which workers must normally improvise, bend, break, extend, and work around formal roles and rules to keep a business running. It also explains why petty bureaucrats (the “clueless” in the GP sense) are basically parasites, because they lack the creativity to go beyond roles and rules in productive ways. They are effectively (and usually without any malicious intent) in “work to rule” mode all the time, and only earn their keep during events when others use them as pawns. Michael on The Office is worse than this, since he does go beyond roles and rules, but in ways that make things worse (for example, trying ham-handed conflict resolution that increases conflict, or attempting to boost morale in ways that actually lower it).
The dynamics behind “work to rule” explain why the following are among the most dangerous threats (intended or unintended) a worker can make:
“Not in my job description.”
“I am just following the rules.”
“Our policy is...”
“We are not allowed to work on weekends.”
“I am not authorized to do that.”
“I don’t know what the policy is on that, I’ll have to ask my manager.”
The last one is particularly good at choking corporations. Since there is so much that is undefined, the default rule kicks in: if you don’t know, defer to your boss. If enough people resort to that rule often enough, the boss will get choked.
Rules are most often designed to protect and insure rather than enable and create. The only time best-faith people bring up the rules is if their protections are being threatened by unreasonable demands, or they are being asked to take on unreasonable risks. If these lines are trotted out at any other time, you have a micro-level “work to rule” situation.
The Yes Minister series is an extreme example. It showcases roles and rules that go way beyond the ones in private corporations; they are actually designed to slow things down.
These dynamics also explain why, outside of collective action situations, sticking to the rules is one of the easiest ways to block, slow down or disrupt things others are trying to do, that you disagree with. If you can’t sustain an overt battle over something, don’t fight; merely execute strictly according to the rules. Due diligence is a powerful weapon.
For someone on the receiving end of this kind of action, a
response is very difficult, since you can’t be easily fired or disciplined for following the rules. Disciplinary or punitive action will have to be based on less defensible notions like “bad attitude.” This is another driver, besides big macro-economic ones, why layoffs are such a popular mechanism: you don’t need reasons.
These dynamics can also work for you if you are trying to increase productivity in a team rather than block things. You need to build trust and goodwill by demonstrating a willingness to protect a “sphere of improvisation” for your reports: a safe zone where you’ll let them operate slightly beyond the roles and rules, in order to get things done, and accept the blame and responsibility. In other words, give others the benefits of going beyond the rules, while taking on the risks. If your team can’t escape certain consequences when things go wrong, by saying “my manager said it was okay,” you are not doing enough for them.
Observation
An Easy Way to Read People
Confirmation bias is the tendency of human beings to preferentially seek out information that confirms their existing beliefs. This can actually be a good thing. But we’ll worry about the good and bad of it some other day. Today, I want to point out a fairly obvious inference from this that you may not have paid much attention to: one of the easiest ways to figure someone out is to look at the information they choose to consume. Let me share another pearl of wisdom from the Yes, Minister book, and Yes, Prime Minister series that illustrates this point. In the episode, A Conflict of Interest, for once the clueless Jim Hacker knows more about something than his sociopath Permanent Secretary, Humphrey Appleby. Here’s a brilliant bit:
Be Slightly Evil: A Playbook for Sociopaths (Ribbonfarm Roughs 1) Page 6
