Later in this piece I discuss the HBO series “Succession.” If you are allergic to anything like a very mild spoiler—I don’t think what I’m going to say spoils anything really—you should not read this. It’s about real and fake in the workplace and how to deal with the difference.
Tell me if this has ever happened to you. You have a boss—a person perhaps one ladder rung ahead of you but not really in charge of the enterprise itself—and he is an entitled jerk, sort of like the legendary one in “Office Space.”
It’s not clear how he got there but there he is. You figure he must have worked his way up, knows the business, has a range of skills, earned the respect of the owners or board or CEO, and eventually was widely trusted.
But then you notice over time that something is off. He is always giving orders, strutting around, acting the part. But in quiet ways, he keeps handing out favors to friends and friends of friends. He is also petty, taking out grievances on people for no good business reason. He personalizes everything.
He seems to be out of town a lot. When he is in the office, it’s mostly for meetings. He schedules as many as possible. He seems to enjoy making others waste time on his demand, and then laughs as they scramble to catch up on missed work while he has nothing to do.
When you catch glimpses of his work, it seems not so much like work but gossiping and information gathering. He uses this information as a kind of weapon within the workplace. He knows company successes and maneuvers to take credit for things he did not do, even as he turns on those who did achieve things and plots to undermine them.
A moment comes when you put him to the test. Write something. Explain something. Provide some practical insight into financials, laws, production, marketing, code, or the customer or donor base. He attempts to do so but makes a major and revealing mistake. He gets a core and crucial point wrong. At that moment, he has revealed the grim piece of evidence that prompts you to look further.
The more you look, the more you discover that he has a very long history of inhabiting these kinds of do-nothing but look-the-part kind of roles. His educational training was nothing practical and his whole career has consisted of trading up via contacts and quid pro quos, backed by schmoozing the right people and tricking people into thinking that he has it going.
Somehow, the entire time, he has never really been found out. That’s because his main skill consists of manipulating the system for his personal benefit. Lacking any actual abilities, he has plenty of time to master the details of the pecking order. He is free to do this because everyone around him actually does work unlike him. That means he has an advantage over anyone competing for his job.
What is the truth about this revered figure? This powerful manager—a person whom I would called an officious figurehead—actually has no ability at all, at least none that is valuable to the enterprise. His absence would be a benefit to everyone but no one can seem to figure out how to make that happen. That’s because he has time on his hands to circumvent any efforts to expose him.
He is toxic, entrenched, draining of company functioning, and demotivating to everyone around him. Oddly, everyone who works with him knows this. The only people who do not are the higher, higher-ups who think he is just great, for whatever reason.
He is officious because he is exacting only in making sure that everyone follows his edicts whether they make sense or not. Adam Smith captured this in his observation about the “Man of System”: “The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamored with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it.”
Over these last couple of decades, the officious figurehead has become a ubiquitous presence in a huge range of organizations. He has always been there in government, of course, but this type began to invade the whole of corporate and nonprofit America. This was because artificially low interest rates heavily subsidized the labor and management sectors of the capital-goods sector. They got into the habit of throwing limitless labor resources at every problem, thus creating millions of these archetypes who have happily lorded it over U.S. commercial and political culture.
Most of these types are thoroughly woke in their political outlook simply because they tend to glom on to the next new thing whatever it is as a means of survival. They are attached to pure symbolism as opposed to raw productivity. The “optics” of woke symbolism appeals to their do-nothing habits and their obliviousness to fiscal and economic reality. The endless streams of funding made all their dreams come true so they just kept going with the flow.
These are the people who made the June “Pride Month” a thing in corporate advertising. They are the people who green-lighted the pride displays at Target, sent the customized beer can to a fake-trans Instagram influencer, and made a design contract with pro-Satan manufacturers. There is no limit to their goofiness because they are completely sealed off from normal contact with regular people. They think of themselves as above it all.
Three major economic trends have destabilized their worldview, power, and position. First, the inflation of the last two years has put pressure on bloated corporations which face the problem of passing on costs to consumers. When they realized they could not, they had to turn to cost cuts in their management structures. Second, higher interest rates changed the financial outlook of any company or industry that relies on debt financing. Third, the consumer is fed up and deciding these days to use spending power to teach these companies a thing or two about reality.
Many thousands of these officious figureheads have now been fired. Elon Musk tossed them all out when he took over Twitter, and his actions inspired many tech companies to do the same. But many other large enterprises are cutting like crazy, figuring out who these bums are and throwing them out on their ears. The nonprofit and foundation sector has a harder time doing it than for-profit companies but they will eventually have to come around.
We are in the early stages of seeing the officious figureheads that ruined American capitalism being thrown to the dogs. There is much more to go. In this environment, nothing about their degrees, their fancy suits, or their power pretensions will protect them.
Which brings us to “Succession.” The entirety of four seasons is about a battle between three siblings for the control of their father’s media empire. We follow them at every stage. It’s not entirely noticeable until you finish the series but finally it dawns on the viewer that none of these kids have ever actually done anything valuable for the company. They know nothing of the financials, the legal struggles, the consumer base, the demographics, the advertisers, or anything else, and they don’t want to know. They are above it all, happy to be well-positioned and privileged.
Even they don’t know how utterly useless they are.
Finally in the end, they find themselves tossed out on their ears, with the realization suddenly hitting them that absolutely no one will miss them because they added no value to the enterprise at all. In fact, the whole media company will function much better without them at all.
“We are nothing,” admits one of the sons in the truest statement he has made in four seasons.
That is the real lesson of the show. It seems to be about how a father cannot decide who will take over after he dies but it is really about a whole class of managers and big shots in today’s commercial world who are puffed up in power but utterly useless or destructive in everything they do. They are interlopers, not creators. So too for millions in the U.S. workplace today.
In that sense, it is the perfect show for our times. It beautifully illustrates the great struggle of our times to get back to actual production, actual value, actual enterprise, and cut it with the fancy-pants nonsense and parasitical power plays that have wrecked so much of economic life today. The officious figureheads are all going down, if we are truly lucky.
