★★★★☆ Funny because it's true

The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong

Laurence J. Peter, Raymond Hull

It was 1969, and I was a high school student when the sound of The Peter Principle was heard in the land. I remember hearing the adults in my life talking about it. What is The Peter Principle? It's a simple idea intended to explain why nothing works the way it should.

You get a job in some organization (could be a company, could be a public school, could be a university -- doesn't matter), and you try to do your job competently. If you succeed, you are promoted to a new position, where your job is different. Specifically, it is not the job in which you just demonstrated competence. Once again, you try to do your job. Two things can happen. One, you are competent, and you get promoted again. Two, you are incompetent, and you don't get promoted -- you remain in the job you are unable to perform competently. (You might think you would be fired or demoted, but in point of fact those outcomes are very rare for ordinary incompetence.) Thus, The Peter Principle (which author Laurence J. Peter named after himself):

In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence

Thus, in a typical organization, every long-time employee is working at a job at that he/she is not competent to fill. Who, if anyone, does the actual work?

Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.

As a high school student I heard the gist of all this. I did not, however read the book until some years later. I believe I was a grad student at Stanford when I got the book out of the library.

I was surprised to find that The Peter Principle was meant to be funny. (And it is! -- not laugh-out-loud funny, but definitely chuckle-under-your-breath funny.) Now you may ask, "How could you possibly have believed that such an idea was serious?" Two answers: First, I have rather a blind spot in this regard. Second, if you ask that question, you are probably one of those blessed innocents who have not read very many books about business management. The popular business management literature is full of seriously-intended books based on ideas that are less well thought-out and less insightful than The Peter Principle. The Peter Principle is a parody of this literature.

That said, Peter, although not serious, is not entirely wrong. In fact, if you have done time in a big organization, you have probably seen The Peter Principle in action -- I certainly have. The Peter Principle is funny because it's true. (It's also quite short -- what more could you ask for?)

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