The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong

by Laurence J. Peter

one reason so many employees are incompetent is that the skills required to get a job often have nothing to do with what is required to do the job itself.

The skills required to run a great political campaign have little to do with the skills required to govern. There is nothing about being a great surgeon that prepares a doctor to run a hospital. Learning to be a great litigator in no way prepares a lawyer to run a law firm.

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

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.

“An unmotivated Patron is no Patron.” See that the Patron has something to gain by assisting you, or something to lose by not assisting you, to rise in the hierarchy.

Never stand when you can sit; never walk when you can ride; never Push when you can Pull.

A recent survey of business failures showed that 53 percent were due to plain managerial incompetence! These were the former followers, trying to be leaders.

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

“The history of mankind is an immense sea of errors in which a few obscure truths may here and there be found.”

scarcely an employee is content to remain at his level of competence: he insists upon rising to a level that is beyond his powers.

just as a candle is all very well to light a dinner table, but proves inadequate if placed on a lamppost to illuminate a street corner.

he became famous on the strength of his theory that man is unconscious of his own motivations, does not understand his own feelings and so cannot hope to relieve his own frustrations.

Lasting happiness is obtainable only by avoiding the ultimate promotion,

An interesting feature of the Auld Lang Syne Complex is that although the typical patient claims to be a martyr to his present position, he never on any account suggests that another employee would be better able to fill his place!

Compulsive Alternation is primarily a defensive technique employed by a boss who has reached his level.

He usually deals with the problems that come to him by keeping them in limbo until someone else makes a decision or until it is too late for a solution.

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.

I drew the inference that the hierarchy cannot trust a man who manages his finances so well that he does not rush to the bank and cash or deposit his pay check in order to cover his bills. Spellman, in short, had shown himself incompetent to behave as the typical employee is expected to behave; hence he had made himself ineligible for promotion.

The method boils down to this: create the impression that you have already reached your level of incompetence.

One administrator told me, “I wish I could pass all the dull pupils and fail the bright ones: that would raise standards and grades would improve. This hoarding of dull students lowers the standard by reducing the average achievement in my school.” Such an extreme policy will not be generally tolerated. So, to avoid the accumulation of incompetents, administrators have evolved the plan of promoting everyone, the incompetent as well as the competent. They find psychological justification for this policy by saying that it spares students the painful experience of failure. What they are actually doing is applying percussive sublimation to the incompetent students. The result of this wholesale percussive sublimation is that high-school graduation may now represent the same level of scholastic achievement as did Grade 11 a few years ago. In time, graduation will sink in value to the level of the old Grade 10, Grade 9 and so on. This phenomenon I designate Hierarchal Regression.

Educational certificates, diplomas and degrees are losing their value as measures of competence.

Escalation of educational effort speeds the process of degradation.

the more powerful the means at my disposal, the greater good or harm I can do by my competence or incompetence. The printing press, radio, television have in turn expanded man’s power to propagate and perpetuate his incompetence. Now comes the computer.

“If you don’t know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else.”