The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong

by Laurence J. Peter

the skills required to get a job often have nothing to do with what is required to do the job itself.

It was logical to conclude that for every job that existed in the world there was someone, somewhere, who could not do it. Given sufficient time and enough promotions he would get that job!

I now expect that statesmen will prove incompetent to fulfill their campaign pledges. I assume that if they do anything, it will probably be to carry out the pledges of their opponents.

One high-school graduate in three cannot read at normal fifth-grade level. It is now commonplace for colleges to be giving reading lessons to freshmen. In some colleges, twenty percent of freshmen cannot read well enough to understand their textbooks!

The Peter Principle: In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence

Particularly among minor officials with no discretionary powers, one sees an obsessive concern with getting forms filled out correctly, whether the forms serve any useful purpose or not. No deviation, however slight, from the customary routine, will be permitted.

Professional Automatism The above type of behavior I call professional automatism. To the professional automaton it is clear that means are more important than ends; the paperwork is more important than the purpose for which it was originally designed. He no longer sees himself as existing to serve the public: he sees the public as the raw material that serves to maintain him, the forms, the rituals and the hierarchy!

A Question of Standards The competence of an employee is determined not by outsiders but by his superior in the hierarchy. If the superior is still at a level of competence, he may evaluate his subordinates in terms of the performance of useful work—for example, the supplying of medical services or information, the production of sausages or table legs or achieving whatever are the stated aims of the hierarchy. That is to say, he evaluates output. But if the superior has reached his level of incompetence, he will probably rate his subordinates in terms of institutional values: he will see competence as the behavior that supports the rules, rituals and forms of the status quo. Promptness, neatness, courtesy to superiors, internal paperwork, will be highly regarded. In short, such an official evaluates input.

The Peter’s Invert or professional automaton has, as we have seen, little capacity for independent judgment. He always obeys, never decides.

Then he went too far, psychoanalyzed himself and claimed to be conscious of his own unconscious. (Some critics now suggest that all he had ever accomplished was to make his patients aware of his own—Freud’s—unconscious.)

Many Words, Few Thoughts Some employees, on final placement, stop thinking, or at least sharply cut down on their thinking. To mask this, they develop lines of General Purpose Conversation or, in the case of public figures, General Purpose Speeches. These consist of remarks that sound impressive, yet which are vague enough to apply to all situations, with perhaps a few words changed each time to suit the particular audience.

The watchword for Side-Issue Specialists is Look after the molehills and the mountains will look after themselves.

Mrs. Vender’s classroom periods are bright and interesting; most of her pupils think she is a good teacher. They do not get on very well with the subject, but they believe that is just because it is so difficult. Mrs. Vender, too, firmly believes that she is a good teacher; she thinks that only the jealousy of less competent teachers above her in the hierarchy bars her from promotion. So she enjoys a permanent, pleasant glow of self-righteousness. Mrs. Vender is Substituting. Her technique is not uncommon, and it may be employed consciously or unconsciously. The rule is: for achieving personal satisfaction, an ounce of image is worth a pound of performance.