His point contradicted itself. That is, the *person* was vanilla, but his whole *group* was fired. In truth, the vanilla person is the one who will be re-hired first. This is an odd, paradoxical truth about employment:
1) Employees who are really innovative, do more than their share of work, and really “try”, only get ‘B’s at best on their evaluations. This is because the waves them make stir things up for everyone else, especially their manager. They are associated with problems.
2) The employees who slack off, doing the bare minimum, but getting it in early, at exactly the same time and same way every time, who never make a mess or a fuss, and never make their manager *think* about them, get ‘A’s. Totally vanilla, they also make the list of “essential employees”. Again, like his example, their weakness is the group. If it goes, they go. They are not the bricks, they are the mortar. But mortar is important.
3) The brown-nosers usually don’t get laid off unless their boss does, because the boss personally doesn’t want to fire them unless he absolutely has to, but only as a last resort. However, they are tied to their bosses boat, and if it sinks, so do they.
You are so right! I once knew of (fortunately from a bit of a distance, but through a friend’s eyes) this exact dynamic in a most dramatic setting, with tumultuous results. Sorry, can’t give any juicy details b/c there were serious legal ramifications inn the end, charges and counter-charges etc., but it was in a university office setting (think of an office run by the scum of the Duke faculty, but at another institution)..... and the dynamic was exactly what you describe: complacent snivelling brown-nosers with cozy sinecures protected by the boss, a more innovative employee who was known as the best of the office but made the boss uneasy (showing her up too often without meaning to, merely by performing and thinking independently), etc.
There was also an intense stream of leftist politically correct b.s. which made me really feel for my friend (who was in the middle of this as a dreaded white male threat to the university PC culture). Bad combo of the worst of mindless bureaucratic culture and pc nonsense.
I knew several of the people involved and despised them all except for my good friend, who get the hell out after awhile due to the Peyton Place of liberal/dyke-fest/gay/dim-witted political correctness.
It was one of the things that made me despise politically correct academic bureaucrats more than ever, since all the snivelling sycophants were well protected by the bull-dyke boss who could only work with such brown-nosers and not with people of actual performance and accomplishment.
Please, please, let it be “The Beltway Boys”!