The Peter principle is therefore expressed as: "In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence." This leads to Peter's corollary: "In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties." Hull calls the study of how hierarchies work hierarchiology. This outcome is inevitable, given enough time and enough positions in the hierarchy to which competent employees may be promoted. Being incompetent, the individual will not qualify for promotion again, and so will remain stuck at this final placement or Peter's plateau. If the person is competent in the new role, they will be promoted again and will continue to be promoted until reaching a level at which they are incompetent. If the promoted person lacks the skills required for the new role, they will be incompetent at the new level, and will not be promoted again. I was able to turn defeat into victory." and six months later "I left that department a well oiled machine, I misplaced my trust in Sue to be able to step into my shoes.The Peter principle states that a person who is competent at their job will earn a promotion to a position that requires different skills. "I'm glad that I took over from Bob when I did. But at each level they made sure that things were structured so that they could take credit for successes that were about to happen, and make sure others were put in place to take the blame for their messes. Programmers who couldn't program, then couldn't manage, then couldn't run a department, then couldn't run a company. The worst part is that people who will reach the highest heights of the Peter Pinnacle were probably terrible from day one and realized that bluster, scheming, and politicking were the only ways they would survive at any level. Whereas under the Peter Pinnacle people get promoted until they run out of hot air (which could be dozens of levels beyond competence). So where I would say the Peter Principle and the Peter Pinnacle differ is that under the Peter Principle people get promoted (typically one level above competence) until they fail.
At that point the "Peter Pinnacle" definitely kicks in. Then reality will kick in as they start to make a mess of things. Where these blowhards succeed is that they are quite capable of launching their careers far beyond what a critical look at their skills and experience would normally justify. Most of the better blowhards had shocking levels of success as compared to the more diligent pilots who just focused on their training and hours. Thus being a blow-hard was a fairly effective method to having people hire you. Oddly enough it is difficult to tell a great pilot it is only easy to detect the bad ones through their misfortunes. Technically there is a third quasi-valid reason to self promote and that is your products suck and you try to sell them through pure con-artistry.Įven years ago I knew a bunch of pilots in training.
One is to neglect what they are supposed to be doing, and the second is that they often have to take credit for others' work.
Whereas the people who relentlessly self promote have to do two seriously broken things. They focus their energies on running their companies. A great example of this is the "Curse of Forbes" which basically states that if you make it onto the cover of Forbes magazine that you or your company is going to be in huge trouble in the not too distant future.īut there are many awesome CEOs who are not a household name and avoid publicity as a waste of time. If you look at many of the CEOs that have been given the heave ho most were becoming household names. A simple to detect symptom of this is the relentless self promotion that many of these people do.