The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong

by Laurence J. Peter

He warned that extremely skilled and productive employees often face criticism, and are fired if they don’t start performing worse. Their presence “disrupts and therefore violates the first commandment of hierarchical life: the hierarchy must be preserved.”

If man is going to rescue himself from a future intolerable existence, he must first see where his unmindful escalation is leading him. He must examine his objectives and see that true progress is achieved through moving forward to a better way of life, rather than upward to total life incompetence.

You will see that in every hierarchy the cream rises until it sours.

the main function of a pseudo-promotion is to deceive people outside the hierarchy. When this is achieved, the maneuver is counted a success.

a percussive sublimation justifies the previous promotion (in the eyes of employees and onlookers, not to a hierarchiologist).

One percussive sublimation serves as carrot-on-a-stick to many other employees.

Hierarchiology tells us that every thriving organization will be characterized by this accumulation of deadwood at the executive level, consisting of percussive sublimates and potential candidates for percussive sublimation.

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.

“How do so many professional automatons win promotion? And is the professional automaton outside the operation of the Peter Principle?” To answer those questions I must first pose another: “Who defines competence?”

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.

internal consistency is valued more highly than efficient service: this is Peter’s Inversion.

“Competence, like truth, beauty and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.”

super-competence is more objectionable than incompetence.

Ordinary incompetence, as we have seen, is no cause for dismissal: it is simply a bar to promotion. Super-competence often leads to dismissal, because it disrupts the hierarchy, and thereby violates the first commandment of hierarchal life: the hierarchy must be preserved.

Employees in the two extreme classes—the super-competent and the super-incompetent—are alike subject to dismissal. They are usually fired soon after being hired, for the same reason: that they tend to disrupt the hierarchy. This sloughing off of extremes is called Hierarchal Exfoliation.

I define Pull as “an employee’s relationship—by blood, marriage or acquaintance—with a person above him in the hierarchy.”

So we see that exceptional leadership competence cannot make its way within an established hierarchy. It usually breaks out of the hierarchy and starts afresh somewhere else.

an employee’s competence is assessed, not by disinterested observers like you and me, but by the employer or—more likely nowadays—by other employees on higher ranks of the same hierarchy. In their eyes, leadership potential is insubordination, and insubordination is incompetence.

Good followers do not become good leaders. To be sure, the good follower may win many promotions, but that does not make him a leader.

A political party is usually naïvely pictured as a group of like-minded people co-operating to further their common interests. This is no longer valid. That function is now carried on entirely by the lobby, and there are as many lobbies as there are special interests.

Even if a majority of the nominating committee consists of competent judges of men, it will select the candidate, not for his potential wisdom as a legislator, but on his presumed ability to win elections!

of course the ability to charm, to amuse, to inflame a crowd of ten thousand voters with voice and gesture did not necessarily carry with it the ability to think sensibly, to debate soberly and to vote wisely on the nation’s business.

So we see that the Peter Principle controls the entire legislative arm of government, from the humblest party worker to the holders of the loftiest elective offices. Each tends to rise to his level and each post tends in time to be occupied by someone incompetent to carry out its duties.

Any government, whether it is a democracy, a dictatorship, a communistic or free enterprise bureaucracy, will fall when its hierarchy reaches an intolerable state of maturity.

an ounce of image is worth a pound of performance. (Peter’s Placebo.)