In 1969, Laurence Peter proposed the Peter Principle : “everyone gets promoted to the level of their incompetence”. So I went into Gervais with a suspicion that the “business book” claim was, at the very least, incomplete. Rao himself doesn’t claim this, but several people said I should read this book to understand Jacques Lacan (I was particularly told to “take it as literally as possible”). Sure, some of you may end up depressed, or make bad decisions as a result of this book, but I believe that is a risk associated with all writing of any substance. A case of “where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.” īut I believe, unlike Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, that almost everyone is capable of “handling the truth”. So acquiring organizational literacy is what some like to call a memetic hazard: dangerous knowledge that may harm you. You may find yourself wishing, if you choose to acquire it, that you hadn’t. This power can have very unpredictable effects. It forces you to own the decisions you make and accept the consequences of your actions…So to seek organizational literacy is to also accept a sort of responsibility for your own life that many instinctively reject. But it does mean that you will find it much harder to lie to yourself about what you are doing and why. Achieving organizational literacy or even fluency does not mean you will do great things or avoid doing stupid things. Just as learning a foreign language makes you deaf to the raw, unintelligible sound of that language you could once experience, learning to read organizations means you can never see them the way you used to, before. This ability, once acquired, cannot be un-acquired. There is a cost to getting organizationally literate. It has triggered significant (and not always positive) career moves for dozens of people that I know of. hazardous reflection for thousands of people over the past four years. According to its introduction:īy my estimate, the material in this book has already triggered. The Gervais Principle, by postrationalist heresiarch Venkatesh Rao, claims to be a business book.
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