Discussion Main / PointyHairedBoss

Linking to a past Trope Repair Shop thread that dealt with this page: Ambiguous Name, started by skadooshbag on Apr 25th 2017 at 6:31:17 PM

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

While it's acknowledged in the entry for Dilbert, there's a subtle difference between the Peter Principle and the Dilbert Principle (which leads to PH Bs). In the former, people are promoted one place beyond their competency; in the latter, people with no skills get promoted to get them to a place where their incompetency does the least damage. I think that this should be rectified in the main description for this trope and on the Peter Principle page. They're somewhat closely related but do not go hand-in-hand.

Moving all of this here because it doesn't seem to fit the trope.

• Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully from Discworld's Unseen University was an attempt at this. After the Sourceror fiasco, the wizards decided to get some quiet rube from the mountains who wouldn't cause any fuss, in order to give them time to put things back together. It didn't work out quite the way the expected. As it turns out, Ridcully is loud, obnoxious(at least to them, what with his irrational insistence on exercise and not dying) and generally extremely competent; before him an Archchancellor was lucky to survive a year without being murdered. The actual duties of an Archchancellor seem to be largely ceremonial, apart from some administrative duties to the city government, so it's difficult to say whether he's competent in the job itself per se, but if something magical threatens the city, he's your man.

  • During one conversation, the narrator explains that his listening habits are perfect for the job of archchancellor: If a person continues explaining something for five minutes, it must be important, and if they give up after a mere minute or so, it would have hardly been worth his time to listen.

  • As Pratchett puts it, Ridcully has a powerful intellect, but it is powerful like a locomotive - it runs on rails and is impossible to steer.
    • Ridcully is also the ONLY Archchancellor to survive more than one book. Arccutter and Weatherwax may have been impressive, but both wound up... missing / dead. Ridcully is the only one who's still here, and ran through several, several, several Discworld books. According to internal mythology, even that's impressive. Tim Curry be damned. Not only survived mind you, but stabilized the entire structure of the university such that the youngest wizards are diverted from the scheming of the past, and the older ones have acclimatized to the new order.
      Dean: We used to kill wizards like him.
      Chair of Indefinite studies:Yes, but we also used to kill wizards like us.
  • I'd say Ridcully is the opposite of a Pointy Haired Boss- he does his job perfectly, which rather upset the Wizards who thought he'd BE a Pointy Haired Boss. The Archchancellor's job is to keep the wizards in order and not attacking everyone else, and while he is quicker to use magic than some, he does that just fine.
  • In the Last Continent, Ridcully's taken up micromanagment, trying to turn the faculty into a lean, mean team. His attempts apparently have had some success, as the book states that while the wizards had no intention of becoming lean, they were getting as mean as anything.
• A better form of this comes in the guise of the Honourable Lord Ronald Rust. A rough quote summing him up:
  "The Rust family had produced great soldiers, by the undemanding standards of 'Deduct your own casualties from that of the enemy, and if the answer is a positive number it was a glorious victory' school of applied warfare. The Hon. Ronald Rust was the god's gift to the enemy, any enemy, and a walking encouragement to desertion."

Whilst he doesn't exactly get promoted as such, he otherwise fits the mould perfect; incredibly stupid, but arrogant, and unusually talented at ignoring stuff that doesn't fit into his own opinion. He's also got an indcredibly high opinion of a talent he does not in fact possess; military tactics.