Excellence Is Clueless Mediocrity

Mediocrity is underrated. Strategic incompetence on the way up, keeping away from the allure of excellence is how people rise in bureaucracy. The self-aware slackers at the Bottom know they need to put in minimum effort possible – it is but their only optimal strategy. The Top players rise through perfectly placed incompetence. It is the clueless Middle who try to optimize the process of improvisation in pursuit of excellence. Excellence is the fluff in the bureaucratic system. People who try to chase it are termed static managers. They are easy to spot. They form the cruft of any organization. In any organization, you take out a handful of self-aware slackers of the Bottom and a bunch of excellence-avoiding perfectionists of the Top, what are you left with? You have the great excellence seeking clueless Middle – the epitome of mediocrity. Middle is 90% of any organization. Then we have 1% that is Top. Remaining 9% is Bottom.

The Middle, Bottom or Top are not, in any way, denotive of the capability or domain expertise of its individual members. It is only in their managerial aspect that we are interested here. Such collectives just follow basic social dynamics. The Top controls the dynamics; Bottom is aware of this, is helpless and follows the least-effort principle to stay in the game. The Middle only exists to keep the Top from dealing with the Bottom directly. It rewards a closer study of such behaviors as seen through the lens of mediocrity.

The world runs on mediocrity. Middle is the glue for any establishment. Mediocrity exists to serve both Top and Bottom. The Top created Middle to make Bottom work for its idea and business interests. The Top then created a concept called Excellence to retain Middle. Every elite club follows the same dynamics. Every office, software company or a research lab – all are same here. The Top and the Bottom are ever moving. Job changes, shuffling loyalties, selling and exiting companies, chasing perfection, doing it or getting it done with least efforts – all form the game play of Top and Bottom people. The Middle chase excellence, they have no other purpose. The Middle is stagnant. Consider office politics or joining a club for example. For a new member to get accepted/approved, he has to prove his mediocrity. Mediocrity is a haze. If the guy were to demonstrate that he is better than the Bottom and inferior to Top, he is readily accepted. Any other tactic wouldn't work. The group will have no interest in taking in another "inferior" Bottom fellow that brings down the average "Bottomness" score. And this is in the best interest of the Top and Bottom classes of the group. If the new guy were to demonstrate his "Topness", though the group may be willing to accept him to boost its average "Bottomness" score, it is in the best interest of the new guy to not join the group as that would bring him no gain.

Rewarding the Middle, the great mediocrity, through the facade of excellence, is an ingenious way to run an organization. The Top runs it successfully not by managing the Middle, but by defining excellence properly. Excellence is different for different organizations. Though a fiction, a figment of Top's imagination, it is the lifeblood of the great Middle. The clueless Middle chases excellence to exist. An inadequate formulation of excellence spells doom for any organization. In fact, it is not the absence of a market, lack of investor interest, bad timing, diversified focus, exhaustion of funds, bad marketing, or similar zany post-mortem reports we get to see for reasons most startups/businesses fail. A large contributor to their failure is a poorly defined "excellence statement" from Top stratum for its Middle. There could be many reasons for this. A common one is that a company is started by a person of Middle psychology, who mistakenly identifies himself to be a Top. In other words, the founder or the Top brass would have consisted of a bunch of excellence seeking people, instead of excellence defining people. The system normalizes itself and chucks out people with Middle mindset from its Top and Bottom layers.

How would one go about finding the \( m^{th} \) Middle person in an office? An office of \( n \) people has a set hierarchy everybody honours. Cutting out \( j \) Bottom self-aware, least-effort, optimally operating workers and \( i \) strategically incompetent, wilful non-learners from Top, we are left with \( n - i - j \) excellence seeking clueless Middle. Because this Middle stratum is hazy in hierarchy, and for someone to leap from Middle to Top, he has to demonstrate his mediocrity, relative to the Top brass. He has to become strategically incompetent, avoid excellence, stop managing people and start delegating tasks optimally. For this to happen, he has to have some sense of his ranking while he plays this game to track his progression. How would he go about continually approximating his mediocracy? He would set a timeline to achieve his goals: the larger the organization, the shorter the timeline for his ascension. The Peter Principle wouldn't apply to him because, Peter Principle explains how one would go about entering into a world of mediocracy – not how it operates or restricts his movements. In the set timeline, he would add \( {AmbitionIndex \over RateOfAscension} \over {Deadline-Present}\) checkpoints for behaviour and ranking estimate correction. \( AmbitionIndex \) denotes how ambitious is the individual at that checkpoint. \( RateOfAscension \) denotes the error measure and \({ Deadline – Present }\) is the timeline normalizer. At any given checkpoint, to find the \( m^{th} \) ranked guy in the Middle, he would arbitrarily pick \(i + j + 1\) people and select \(m - i + 1^{th} \) guy with highest perceived excellence rating. If the selected individual has won an excellence award in the previous month, he can be safely ignored since he poses no threat of competition. Our aspirant should look for the \(m + 1^{st} \) guy to supersede by directing him to excellence rewarding honeypots and piggyback on him for all tasks. He should exhibit no signs of efficiency during this period while signalling high productivity. In a software consultancy firm for instance, such tasks typically include intense 24/7 Googling on unrelated topics and sending long, numerous & unnecessary emails, while delegating your share of software maintenance, code and performance reviews, patent/paper writing and documentation, customer support and HR issues to his target.