Life Lessons from the Great Michael Scott

The Office was the greatest of TV shows.

In the ridiculousness of Steve Carell's great character, lie some true pearls of wisdom. One of my writing dreams is to actually write his fictional unpublished management book, "Somehow I Manage". I don't know if I'm up to the task, though.

For those unfamiliar with the show, "The Office" was a mockumentary about a series of characters working at the imaginary paper company, Dunder Mifflin. Michael Scott was the boss, and the most popular employees were Jim and Pam Halpert, Dwight Schrute, and Andy Bernard.

The show was a spin-off from a British original, made in a flash of genius by the otherwise awful Ricky Gervais.

For me, the US version was much better because it had some elements of hope in the satire of workplace culture - the British version was far more acidic in its portrayal of a boring, going-nowhere white collar work environment.

Those elements of hope in the US version truly contained some real wisdom - mostly in the form of the lead character, Michael.

Michael was a boss who prided himself on being at the forefront of a cool new style of management, in which he saw himself as a team-builder, an entertainer, rather than a traditional boss. In so doing, he made himself ridiculous, but also strangely wise.

Here are a few of his greatest moments, that will always resonate with me.

Like all great comedians, Carell knew just how much pathos, just how much sadness, to insert into his character. We saw how self-centred Michael Scott was, how utterly incompetent, but because we saw it so clearly, we empathized with him.

And this made it believable that when the paper corporation shuts down in the recession, only Michael's branch remains open, because only his office is profitable. And we believe it because we know his office, his management, is human.

As he says to the young intern, Ryan, who has just proposed that the paper industry has no future, "A good manager doesn't fire people. He hires people and inspires people. ... People, Ryan. And people will never go out of business."

But Pam probably puts it best, in the last line of the final episode, when she says, "There’s a lot of beauty in ordinary things. Isn’t that kind of the point?"

For a show about a boring paper company, that is precisely the point.

When I grow up, I want to be Michael Scott.