‘The Office’: Why David Wallace Is a Bad Boss
The Office is a show about a bad boss: Michael Scott (Steve Carell). The image of him holding up a coffee mug reading “World’s Best Boss” is the show’s central irony—Michael thinks he’s great at his job, but really he makes life harder for all of his employees through his constant need for adoration and managerial ineptitude. The show’s writers then filled out this concept (based on the more acid-tongued British sitcom of the same name) with a cast of colorful characters who could provide subplots and conflicts that gave the show a personality. But if you were to ask a layperson “What do you know about The Office?” the answer would probably be along the lines of “Oh, it’s that funny show where Steve Carell plays the bad boss.”
I’ve become something of an Office aficionado since meeting my wife five years ago. It was already her comfort show that she would watch at the end of a long day and we’ve now watched it through together six or seven times (although we usually bail after Steve Carell leaves the series and we skip over the particularly brutal episodes like “Scott’s Tots” and “Prince Family Paper”). During our many rewatches, we’ve come to the conclusion that while Michael is obviously “bad” at his job, Dunder-Mifflin CFO David Wallace (Andy Buckley) is also bad, and perhaps even worse. He makes a string of obviously bad decisions that show Wallace doesn’t understand the people he’s working with or supposed to manage.
It should be noted there are ways in which Michael is good at his job. Yes, all of the way he needs adoration and distracts his employees from their jobs is apparent, but the series also takes time to note his successes. There are times when it looks like Michael isn’t doing any work but ends up closing a major client (his desperate need to be liked is one of his most valuable assets as a salesman). He also tells Ryan, before sending him to the annex, “A good manager doesn’t fire people. He hires people and inspires people.” Even David Wallace can see that while Michael is not their “most traditional guy” his management style gets positive results.
Before I continue, obviously The Office is a fictional show that tweaks its reality in order to continue the story and maximize its comic potential. For example, in the early seasons, the Scranton branch did so poorly that it was in danger of closing but later on we’re told that it outperforms all of the other branches. Why does this happen? Because you can’t always have the branch on the verge of closing or else the plot becomes stale, and as we get to know the full cast better, we need to think that they’re good at their jobs even if Michael is only good at sales. I understand that the “decisions” David Wallace makes are in service of the show’s comedy rather than someone actually running a business, but they’re still bad decisions even though the show wants to depict Wallace as competent yet beleaguered.
The first major misstep David Wallace makes is hiring Ryan (B.J. Novak) to work at corporate. For a guy who supposedly is doing a thorough search to replace Jan (Melora Hardin) and wants to see performance numbers, he ends up hiring a guy who has never made a sale or has any managerial experience. He hires Ryan because Ryan is young and has an MBA. Unsurprisingly, Ryan quickly gets in over his head, builds his entire brand on a website with a needless social networking aspect, and ends up defrauding the company’s shareholders to cover his ass. Somehow, none of this blows back on the guy who decided to hire Ryan in the first place.
David Wallace makes another catastrophic error when he fails to properly value Michael, who at this point he recognizes as leading a successful branch, by putting Charles Miner (Idris Elba) in charge. We should note that the only person in the course of the series who ever successfully manages Michael is Jo Bennett (Kathy Bates), who demonstrates hard work with a no-nonsense attitude that doesn’t challenge Michael’s identity as much as it challenges his work ethic. The problem that Jan, Ryan, and Charles all encounter is that Michael craves respect but they think (understandably) that as his superior he needs to respect them.
Wallace then compounds his error by letting Michael walk (he should have relented and given Michael some kind of meaningless promotion, but as we’ve seen Wallace is bad at understanding people) and form a paper company whose sole mission is to basically steal customers away from Dunder-Mifflin. In order to correct a problem that he thought he could solve with Charles Miner (and perhaps Miner could have fixed the other branches, but Wallace should have known that Michael is a special case), Wallace ended up losing business and in order to get that business back he had to pay full salaries to the employees he lost.
By the end, David Wallace has lost his job (technically he gets Dunder-Mifflin back thanks to Andy and a whole convoluted thing in the later seasons) and the company while Michael, the “bad boss”, gets to stick around. Michael has a sea of character flaws, but his branch (inexplicably) works. The argument could easily be made that the Scranton branch would be even more effective with a normal manager in charge instead of an overgrown child who acts like he’s the headliner at a comedy club, but Scranton works and as the series continues, you can see that the employees have a begrudging affection for Michael (the affability of Steve Carell cannot be understated).
Meanwhile, David Wallace, who was never good at his job, lucked into a fortune because the U.S. military purchased “Suck It”, a vacuum invented to pick up toys. You tell me who’s the better boss.
