The Corporate Evil Principle

Here's another semi-tongue-in-cheek idea from years ago that I used to offer to my co-workers in order to unhelpfully explain why they could never escape what was affectionately referred to as 'The Bullshit.'

I call it the Van Cleve's Corporate Evil Principle, on account of the importance of self-promotion when identifying a heretofore often observed --but rarely pendantically expounded-- basic principle of nature. Like Newton's theory of Gravity; Brownian Motion, or Clarke's law.

Van Cleve's Corporate Evil Principle runs along the same logic as the Peter Principle, in that it extrapolates the likely experience of a single individual outward to encompass the entire organization that employs that individual. The Peter Principle basically states that all corporations are run by incompetent boobs because the primary (and often the only) way that they reward good performance is through promotion, and these promotions are often to jobs that have completely different performance objectives than the one at which the promoted employee was accelling. The end result of this chain of promotions is that the once deserving employee is now in a job that he's not especially good at, but is unlikely to be fired from, and he got there by excelling at something that he is no longer allowed to do.

Van Cleve's Corporate Evil principle doesn't really care about peter. Peter, it can be argued, is too nice to ascend past his trifling lower to middle management post. The Corporate Evil principle is a lot more interested in employees who have what it takes to ascend all the way, or at least pretty much all the way, to the top.

Think about the qualities that are most likely to result in a promotion to upper-management. Qualities like the ability to pretend you like someone when you don't, attention to image over substance, willingness to scapegoat others to save yourself, and other forms of backstabbery are far more likely to win promotions than someone who is cautious, genuine, takes responsibility for their own failurues, and admits when someone else is a better choice for the job.

In other words: The personality qualities that we typically associate with Evil are far, far more likely to get you promoted than the personality qualities that we associate with good.

Over time, this advantage tends to result in more and more Evil peolple rising to the top. Add this to the fact that most people tend to wish to associate with people that they can relate to (people that are like themselves) and you must conclude that, over time, this process causes all corporations to become (on average) Evil. Insofar as the big decisions of business are being made by people who are more and more likely to be evil.

After about 50 years, when just about everyone who started the company --therefore not subject to this Evil-ify-ing process-- has retired from active management of the company, it may even be fari to refer to the company as 'Completely Evil.' Since pretty much all of the major decision makers in said company are themselves Evil people.

Of course, this wouldn't hold true if a company managed to find a way to disadvantage Evil people when deciding who should be promoted; but as of yet, I haven't thought of one.

Perhaps Good People are going to need some sort of Affirmative Action-type plan in the not too distant future.