I recorded the first episode of a podcast to go with the blog today. It was literally while you were typing this. I made a joke (that is almost not a joke) about my N-2 rule.
You can say all N managers in any organization are bad apart from two of them. Of course, managers want to assert that they're the good one (and some of them actually are), but they can't if you say one person is good, because to claim that spot would be to throw all your colleagues under the bus. But if you assert that you're one of the two good ones, then they can all claim to be one of the good ones without upsetting a specific person.
This is obviously not how it works at all, but I was very proud of myself.
In the Air Force we used to get force stratified based on our peers in our performance reports. It would include things like “#1 of 15 Lts in the squadron”. Everyone had a ranking, but you only found out where you stood once a year when your performance review came out.
There was a saying that I think also applies here: “Everybody knows who #1 is, and everybody thinks they’re #2”.
You can say all N managers in any organization are bad apart from two of them. Of course, managers want to assert that they're the good one (and some of them actually are), but they can't if you say one person is good, because to claim that spot would be to throw all your colleagues under the bus. But if you assert that you're one of the two good ones, then they can all claim to be one of the good ones without upsetting a specific person.
This is obviously not how it works at all, but I was very proud of myself.