One persona could be that of the dispassionate professional who simply tells it as it is, but there is flavour of permanent wallflower about that one. How does a highly ambitious professional stand out from the clever clogs and define his or her professional competence as somehow superior? One popular route is to become a professional blockhead.
To be a professional blockhead one has to promote blockhead initiatives and insist that they are the only professional and rational way to go. This approach has a number of outcomes which benefit the professional blockhead.
- Public attention is directed at the professional blockhead.
- Professional blockhead is seen to lead the blockhead initiative.
- If the initiative is pushed hard enough, other professionals shrug and accept it.
- Professional blockhead climbs the greasy pole.
3 comments:
At work I noticed that there was a minority of pushy people who were very keen on taking on ever-greater workloads. They claimed as much credit for their work as possible, and often that of other people. Some were coarsely self-aggrandising, and others were more subtle, but all did it. Their lust for recognition and status, and mixing with people they thought were important, was often obscene.
I reckon the very best of this breed are the types of people who end up flanking the PM in crises.
Sam is quite right. I have observed such people make catastrophic mistakes which are discounted, whilst smaller mistakes by others are punished.
Sam and Tammly - that's what I saw too. The best scientists I ever came across never got anywhere within the hierarchy, while others with far more limited ability were busy climbing the greasy pole.
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