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CORPORATE GLOSSARY
The Day I Discovered I’d Been Living a Lie at Work
Learn the secret meaning of common corporate words
This week’s corporate glossary terms: Meritocracy and Kakistocracy with a decision fallacy to beware of thrown in for good measure.
I was today years old when I learned the opposite of a meritocracy is a kakistocracy.
In case you missed that day at school, a meritocracy is a system where rewards go to people based on talent, effort, and achievement instead of favoritism, cronyism, nepotism, or some other -ism that replaces merit. Short version? You do the work, you get the reward.
How we get hooked
Without giving it too much thought, we assume we’ll take a job, and our hard work, good work, or the combination of both will translate to more money and more power.
Without ever saying so, you and the people hiring you act under the assumption that progress will be merit-based. Yet, meritocracy is a rarely spoken word.
Even the most confident job seekers hedge when it comes time to hold a potential employer’s feet to the fire and get a fair deal in negotiations. It’s not just you. To a person, job seekers live in fear of the career equivalent of a shark attack: that is, a potential employer will revoke their offer if you ask for “too much.”
This rarely happens, but like shark attacks, it strikes fear in people.
In the 7th grade, a bout of severe bronchitis caused me to miss school for a week. Mrs. Richardson’s civics class probably covered the various form of governance ending in “ocracy” then. But for that week-long absence, I might have recognized what I was experiencing and not guffawed when this happened to me decades later.
A lesson from a co-worker
“Hey, what’s up?” I asked my favorite colleague as he fast-walked New York city style back to his desk in the chic, downtown high-rise offices where we worked.
This was the second company we’d worked at together, and I’d learned at the first that conversations with him turned out to be uncannily informative. If you find someone who dispenses good…
