Running The World On The Peter Principle

A couple weeks ago, when we were going through the local Costco, I found Mrs. Little standing at the book table. A dangerous thing. She picked up Thomas Sowell’s book on Economics – translated into Chinese. But, as I looked around the table, I saw ‘The Peter Principle’, and I told her that The Peter Principle is more important than the book on economics. So, she got both. And yes, Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy, by Thomas Sowell, is a great book to read, if you want to learn about economics.

#PeterPrinciple #Incompetence #OmegaShock

Again, the more important book is The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong by Dr. Laurence J Peter and Raymond Hull. The observations in that book speak more to how the world actually runs, than any book on economics.

The Peter Principle basically says that people get promoted to their level of incompetence.

Someone who is a great clerk will often get promoted to middle manager. If she’s a reasonably good manager, she’ll get promoted to department head. If she keeps doing a reasonably good job, she’ll keep getting promoted until she is unable to do her job. If she turns out to be a terrible head of her department, she’ll stop getting promotions. But, she’ll stay on as the head of her department and continue making horrible decisions.

That’s how organizations work. Everyone who is good at an entry-level position, gets promoted. If they do well at the mid-level position, they get another promotion. Eventually, they get promoted to a job that they just aren’t able to do.

My first technical writing job was just like that. My boss was a great technical writer. He was so good that he got promoted to the head of the writing team. He was absolutely terrible at that position and completely mishandled my assignment. I was a Unix guy who was given the job of maintaining the API guide for an OS/390 application.

If you know anything about Unix and OS/390, you’ll know that they do not mix. At all. And, the team leader could not see the problem. He’s a great guy, but even to this day, he still doesn’t quite understand what happened.

A worse example happened when I was back in the US. I found a job writing guides for a custom application being developed in-house for the Indiana Department of Child Services. The government of Indiana was spending millions of dollars to develop this software, but the head of the department tasked with running this effort destroyed all of it through inept management.

Millions upon millions of dollars and a massive amount of effort were lost because the manager running the program had been promoted to her level of incompetence. And, there was absolutely no way that you could tell her that she was destroying the program – along with everything that she touched.

She had probably been a great social worker. She might even have been a great manager of social workers. But, when she was promoted to a job that oversaw in-house software development, she was terrible.

It was the most soul-destroying experience that I’d ever had. But, it helped me see how government agencies work, and how they are ruled by The Peter Principle. And, it also encouraged me to take the first opportunity to leave the US for Asia, to do evangelism.

It was God, putting me in an uncomfortable position, so that I would make the right decision at the right time.
The Key Takeaway

The main thing that you need to understand is that large organizations always Always ALWAYS fail. And, a big part of this failure is due to the promotion of good people to positions that they just cannot handle. And, since more and more of the world is being managed by big organizations… the world will continue to be horribly horribly mismanaged.

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Author: John Little - OmegaShock.com

John Little knows that Jesus Christ is the only way of salvation. A writer who currently lives in southern Taiwan, John still considers Jerusalem home. He holds an MBA and is married to the most beautiful woman on the planet. John has lived in Asia for 25 years and strongly dislikes writing/recording doom-and-gloom articles and videos. Unfortunately, your survival is at stake, so he will keep doing them.