Friday, September 2, 2011

Myers-Briggs meets office politics

A friend of mine wrote this some time ago.  It's breathlessly cynical, but quite funny.  I'm posting it with his permission.  Everyone (here in the USA, at least) enjoy their holiday weekend!

Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2001 21:11:10 -0600
From: An Anonymous Security Consultant

After 10 years as a cryptography/security consultant, I recently
crossed over the line, and became a "security architect" for a
startup.  It seemed a good idea at the time, until one day, when I saw
in my inbox an "invitation" to a series of offsite management training
sessions.  Oh, _good_: 8.5 hours locked in a room with an HR-type and
an urn full of bad coffee, singing the company song, coloring inside
the lines, practicing the bland, meaningless smiles...   I'll just
catch up with everything else on Tuesday, right?

So, inevitably, in the middle of listening to the usual noise about
how to empower our subordinates (half of us in the room counted
ourselves lucky not to _have_ subordinates, but I digress), we
flinched as the the HR-type whipped out the dreaded Meyers-Briggs
test.  Yes, even though all of us had taken this personality test more
than once before, in similar self-improvement death-marches, and even
though we all could classify each other as ESTP or INTJ on sight, and
even though we all knew...  Well, we had to take it again, and we had
to have our long-familiar "scores" explained to us again, and we all
were very upbeat about it, because after all, this _was_ a
self-_improvement_ deathmarch, and not a deathmarch of some other
variety.

During this mess, I reflected on my own seat-of-the-pants
classification of personality types, honed and refined during my
decade of teaching crypto-101 to brokerage sysadmins:

I mainly use two orthogonal axes to classify people.

First,  everyone is either an Ally, or is not an Ally.
Second, everyone is either an Enemy, or not.

So, we can group people (coworkers, customers, investors, etc.) into
four classes, right off the bat, without any insipid HR testing:

    People who are Allies;  People who are Enemies;
    People who are both;    People who are neither.

People who are both Ally and Enemy call themselves "diplomatic," but
of course, they're really just Traitors, or at best just unnecessary
competition.  They should handled as briefly as possible, if you get
my drift.

People who are neither Enemy nor Ally like to pretend that they're
just bystanders, but this point of view is wasteful of these persons'
great potential, which must properly be "developed."  So, I further
subdivide this one group into two categories:

    People who can be used as Weapons;
    People who can be used as Hostages.

So, instead of M-B's 16 personality-types, I count five:

    Allies, Enemies, Traitors, Weapons, and Hostages.

This system of personality analysis is, I submit, at once more
comprehensive and more useful than the feel-good Meyers-Briggs in many
realistic situations, whether you're in a design review, a
maximum-security prison, or even in an all-day meeting with HR.  Well,
OK, that last one isn't strictly a realistic situation.  But you get
my drift.

Thanks for sharing.
 Me, I'm an ENTP, but am always on the lookout for Allies and Traitors.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm an INTJ. Does that explain my 10,000 rounds?

NotClauswitz said...

Interesting background to the old Progressive deathmarch. Apparently
back in the 1920's as a means to writing fiction, the Mother-Daughter team of Myers and Briggs came up with a personality-type classification system to aid in their fiction writing...

I thing I scored as an INTP, but I forget - couldda been a "J". It was a Stanford University-driven deathmarch so the HR people could feel good about the lay-offs.

perfidy said...

OMG that's beautiful. Just last week I was reaching for and not finding the phrase, "HR deathmarch". And that classification scheme is simply perfect, except for the difficulty in self-classification. I'd hate to take a test and find I was the enemy.

Old NFO said...

ROTFLMAO! Love it!!! and INTJ here too with 20k rounds... NOT counting the .22 stuff

JD said...

OK, as a person with a psych background let me say that is the most accurate assessment of work relations I have ever seen. . . I may have to steal this. . .

TOTWTYTR said...

While I've had to endure many ours of this kind of BS at our re-education camps, I mean training sessions, I've never had a Meyers-Briggs thing. Doesn't seem like I've missed anything.

I think this missed one important work type, the Tool. Where I work we have many Tools, unfortunately not of the useful kind. Unlike the tools that you might be used to, these prevent work from being done, not help it.