A TL:DR

Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management (clueless), groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves.

3 types of people: Sociopaths, The Clueless, and Losers.

S - comprises the Darwinian/Protestant Ethic will-to-power types who drive an organization to function despite itself.

L - bare-minimum effort people who have taken a “bad economic bargain” for a steady paycheck (NOT social “loser”).

C - over-performing, extremely (sometimes blindly) loyal losers that are fast-tracked into management.

“The Sociopaths defeated the Organization Men and turned them into The Clueless not by reforming the organization, but by creating a meta-culture of Darwinism in the economy: one based on job-hopping, mergers, acquisitions, layoffs, cataclysmic reorganizations, outsourcing, unforgiving start-up ecosystems, and brutal corporate raiding. In this terrifying meta-world of the Titans, the Organization Man became the Clueless Man. Today, any time an organization grows too brittle, bureaucratic and disconnected from reality, it is simply killed, torn apart and cannibalized, rather than reformed. The result is the modern creative-destructive life cycle of the firm, which I’ll call the MacLeod Life Cycle.”

Life Cycle:

Sociopath recruits bare minimum number of losers to kick off an idea. As business grows and encounters new problems the sociopath fast-tracks overzealous losers into the Clueless layer to help organize the chaos. Once the amount of easily extracted value hits diminishing returns the company is cannibalized, recycling only the rare nuggets of value and discarding the rest.

Sociopaths and Losers typically have no loyalty but the Clueless are typically incapable of being anything but loyal to the end.

“Here is the ultimate explanation of Michael Scott’s careers: they are put into a position of having to explain their own apparent, unexpected and unexamined success. It is easy to explain failure. Random success is harder. Remember, they are promoted primarily as passive pawns to either allow the Sociopaths to escape the risks of their actions, or to make way for the Sociopaths to move up faster. They are presented with an interesting bit of cognitive dissonance: being nominally given greater power, but in reality being safely shunted away from the pathways of power. They must choose to either construct false narratives or decline apparent opportunities."

The show is made to give an outlook from The Clueless perspective rather than the typical Loser perspective.