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A review by architr
The Peter Principle by Raymond Hull, Laurence J. Peter
4.0
This book was originally meant to be a satire. However, to any working professional, the author's principles will ring true & will clarify your doubts as to why organizations are filled with so many clowns.
5 stars for the concepts but 4 stars for the writing. It could have been more crisp.
The Peter Principle states that "you rise to the level of your incompetence" i.e. you keep getting promoted in a hierarchical organization (based on your current competence) until you reach a point where you become "incompetent" because you no longer possess the relevant skills to perform the job.
Based on the above principle, the author has framed epiphanic corollaries, offshoots etc. which substantiate his point.
1. If you – or anyone else – perform well at your job, you will get promoted, but there’s a catch. Your first promotion is likely to move you to a position that demands most of the same skills you used at your previous position. If you do well at your new job, you will get promoted again. Each time you get promoted, your new position will require fewer and fewer of the skills, perceptions, habits or managerial abilities that enabled you to shine at your first job. At some point in this cycle of recurring promotion, you will get promoted into a job for which you aren’t prepared and can’t perform. You will “rise to [your] level of incompetence.” And there you will stay.
For example, good political campaigners are seldom competent at governing. “Good followers” don’t magically become “good leaders,” and, while conformists thrive, rebels often don’t. Peter identifies the organizational problem behind this phenomenon: The people at the top, ipso facto, aren’t good at their jobs. And, the greatest fear of those at their level of incompetence atop the ladder is being found out. That’s why midlevel managers revile those who excel. If you show excellence, you threaten the hierarchy. And all hierarchies share one goal – maintaining themselves. The most necessary survival skill an employee needs is “creative incompetence,” doing enough to get by, but not enough to be offered a promotion, ever. Have you wondered why those high up in a company or bureaucracy perform their jobs so poorly? Now you know.
2. Visible Mediocrity
The Peter Principle comes with a crucial corollary: “Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.” Behaviors like “professional automatism” thwart the will and desires of competent people. Peter cautions that professional robots vest in the identifiable chores of work – such as filling out forms – rather than in the work itself. This employee or boss acts and works as if paperwork matters more than the actual task the papers describe. But the automaton knows paperwork is quantifiable. If you do all your paperwork, you might get promoted. Someone who’s really good at a job but hates paperwork doesn’t stand a chance. Superiors like “dependability, consistency” and “method.” They don’t care much for originality. Peter warns that most bosses value “internal consistency” over “efficient service
3. “Pull and Promotion”
To rise in any hierarchy, you must have pull, defined as your relationship “by blood, marriage or acquaintance” with someone above you in the hierarchy. Nobody likes anybody who gets promoted due to pull. No, wait. Nobody likes anybody else who gets promoted that way. Peter and Hull explain that when you get promoted, regardless of your pull, your advance is clearly due to your superior job skills. You gain pull by finding and influencing a patron, escaping the job ceiling above you and being ready to do whatever your patron demands. Those with the most patrons have the most pull. To play this game, never show ambition for a position above your patron’s job; make every patron feel like the most important person in your work life.
4. “Push and Promotion”
Push means being pushy. Push exists in perpetual struggle against those who have seniority. The people above you resist your push because they can. Some superiors will even admire your push but only those you can’t push you aside on your upward trajectory. Flashy self-improvement, like taking extra classes, is the most irritating, weakest form of push. Pushy people often show off “pseudo-achievements.” While such deeds can impress dim superiors, they’ll enrage your peers. Push shows greater will but less effectiveness than pull, so “never push when you can pull.”
5. “Followers and Leaders”
Having followers become leaders usually ends in disaster. When loyal, obedient, good followers become leaders they seldom “exercise leadership.” In fact, they generally make their direct reports much less efficient and “waste the time” of those above them. However, Peter and Hull note in contrast, bad followers often make excellent leaders. Take Thomas Edison; he failed as a newsboy, but once he was in charge of his own business, he changed history. When real leaders appear, fear and resentment grow. Peter calls this “hypercaninophobia,” fear of the “top dog.” The only thing worse is “hypercaninophobia complex” – fear that someone lower in the hierarchy could one day become your top dog.
6. Freud’s Analysis
The pioneering psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud – “a satirist at heart” – recognized the curse of the “Generalized Life–Incompetence Syndrome” well before other thinkers. Freud didn’t call it that, of course, but this book does. Suffering this syndrome generates tremendous levels of frustration. Freud tended to identify such frustrations as manifest in various sexual neuroses. He thought frustration springs from the impotent need to change your life’s position to something better – this might show up, for instance, as the urge to get a promotion. Never mind. Peter and Hull teach that true frustration will set in only after you achieve that promotion. You can obtain true, enduring happiness only by never being promoted beyond your natural level of competence.
7. “Hierarchiology & Politics”
The motivating thought pattern of anyone in a hierarchy is that the less those lower down get paid, the more “salaries, bonuses, dividends and fringe benefits” become available for those higher up. That’s one reason, Peter notes, that a sensible hierarchy never hires more people than it needs. However, “inefficient hierarchies” often hire more people than necessary, because they’ve promoted most of their leaders beyond their competence level, so they can’t do their jobs. Thus, people at the top hire more incompetent people to pick up the slack from existing incompetents.
8. “Life-Competence”
Being incompetent at a job, as Peter describes it, will seldom derail a career. Incompetence often guarantees career success. But what about being incompetent at life? Humankind has, through history, progressed from “caveman to fire lighter to bronze smelter to iron founder.” This means people may fool themselves into believing that humanity always will continue to progress and self-promote. Instead, Peter finds an ominous stalling in human progress, a “hierarchical regression.” This refers to the ever-increasing devaluing of the markers of merit that people once found meaningful, like high school graduation. Accordingly, due to hierarchical regression, college degrees will carry less social or job-market weight and their value will only decrease.
9. One of these illusory exceptions is when someone who is incompetent is still promoted anyway. They coin the phrase "percussive sublimation" for this phenomenon of being "kicked upstairs". But it is only a pseudo-promotion: a move from one unproductive position to another. This improves staff morale, as other employees believe that they too can be promoted again. Another pseudo-promotion is the "lateral arabesque", when a person is moved out of the way and given a longer job title.
10. An ounce of image is worth a pound of performance
11. If Tom, an incompetent Senior Marketing Consultant, is promoted to Vice President of Customer Relation Management, this promotion justifies Tom’s becoming a Senior Consultant in the first place, because this sideward shift makes it seem like he’s still competent. Additionally, his colleagues, knowing the true incompetence of Tom, might think, “Hey, if this guy got a VP position, I can too” – encouraging them to keep pushing for a promotion in vain.
A Lateral Arabesque promotes someone incompetent by offering them a shiny new job title. Take a certain Mr. Schmidt, who is now an incompetent Senior Facility Manager, even though he did the exact same job as a maintenance man. The larger the organization, the more Lateral Arabesques you’ll find.
12. The Peter Principle Key Idea #4: Look out for the common symptoms of Final Placement Syndrome.
By now you might be wondering just what’ll happen to you after you reach your final placement. When you get to your level of incompetence, you simply aren’t able to do your work. And this incompetence leads to some unpleasant maladies.
If you’ve reached your level of incompetence, you might suffer from the Final Placement Syndrome (FPS). Here are some common symptoms: Tabulatory Gigantism – the absolute need to have a bigger desk than your colleagues; or Cachinnatory Inertia – the practice of telling jokes all the time instead of working. No doubt you’ve seen a few of these cases in your own workplace.
Some doctors identified high blood pressure, peptic ulcers, insomnia, and sexual impotence as health issues for seemingly successful people – this is classic FPS. But since Final Placement isn’t recognized by the medical profession, you might run into some of the following issues.
The Peter Principle Key Idea #5: Learn to avoid or cope with your incompetence.
Given FPS, reaching your level of incompetence is definitely something to fear. But fret not! If you want to avoid the negative impacts of reaching your final placement, there are ways to ensure you never get there. Creative Incompetence is the best way to steer clear of promotions without rejecting them directly.
To be creatively incompetent, you have to create the image that you have already reached your final placement. In other words, start trying to appear slightly incompetent. This will save you from receiving those unwanted promotion offers. And it’s easier than you think! Some reliable techniques include parking your car from time to time in your boss's spot, failing to laugh at your boss’s jokes and raising uncomfortable topics at the company barbecue.
If you do reach your level of incompetence, Substitution helps you avoid FPS and continue working without the negative side effects of your final placement. One fantastic technique to substitute successfully is Perpetual Preparation, where you do everything but the actual work.
Health & happiness at Peter's Plateau - possibility or pipe dream?
Employees who have reached Peter's Plateau (their level of incompetence) can reach in several ways:
• Face the Sordid Truth (Not Recommended!) - the employee realises consciously that he has achieved final placement. But he tends to equate incompetence with laziness; he assumes he is not working hard enough, so he drives himself mercilessly. He rapidly falls victim to Final Placement Syndrome.
• Ignorance is Bliss - the employee never realises that he has reached his level of incompetence. He keeps perpetually busy, never loses his expectation of further promotion, and so remains happy and healthy. He does so by the process of Substitution: instead of carrying out the proper duties of his position, he substitutes them for some other set of duties, which he carries out to perfection. Here are several Substitution techniques:
• Technique #1: Perpetual Preparation -
• Confirm the need for action: "Better safe than sorry".
• Study alternate methods: the Substitutor will want to be sure that he chooses the most efficient course of action.
• Obtain expert advice.
• First things first - minute, painstaking, time-consuming attention to every phase of preparation for action.
• Technique #2: Side-issue specialisation -
• Technique #3: Image Replaces Performance - An ounce of image is worth a pound of performance (Peter's Placebo). Peter's Placebo is well understood by politicians.
• Technique #4: Utter Irrelevance - This is a daring technique: the Utter Irrelevantist makes not the slightest pretense of doing his job.
• Technique #5: Ephemeral Administrology - Particularly in large, complex hierarchies, an incompetent senior employee can sometimes secure temporary appointment as acting director of another division. He refrains from taking any significant action in the new post. "I can't make that decision: we must leave that for the permanent director, whenever he is appointed".
• Technique #6: Convergent Specialisation - Finding himself incompetent to carry out all the duties of his position, he simply ignores most of them and concentrates his attention and efforts on one small task.
13. Apparent exceptions
The following are apparent exceptions, but on closer examination they do not in fact violate the Principle:
The Percussive Sublimation - a hopelessly incompetent person, a bottleneck, that management kicks upstairs so as to get him out of the road.
The Lateral Arabesque - the incompetent employee is given a new and longer title and is moved to an office in a remote part of the building.
Peter's Inversion - e.g. amongst minor officials with no discretionary powers, one sees an obsessive concern with getting the forms filled out correctly, whether the forms serve any useful purpose or not. No deviation, however slight, from the customary routine will be permitted. The Peter's Invert (aka professional automaton) always obeys, never decides. This, from the viewpoint of the hierarchy, is competence, so the Peter's Invert is eligible for promotion. He will continue to rise unless some mischance places him in a post where he has to make decisions. Here he will find his level of incompetence.
Hierarchal Exfoliation - the case of the brilliant, productive worker who not only wins no promotion, but is even dismissed from his post. Indeed, in most hierarchies, super-competence is more objectionable than incompetence. Ordinary incompetence 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.
The Paternal In-Step - this is when the owner of a family business brings in his son at a high level with the idea that in time, without rising through the ranks, he should take over the supreme command ("step into his father's shoes"). There are two ways this can happen:
An existing employee is dismissed/removed to make place for the in-stepper; or
A new position, with an impressive title, is created for the in-stepper.
5 stars for the concepts but 4 stars for the writing. It could have been more crisp.
The Peter Principle states that "you rise to the level of your incompetence" i.e. you keep getting promoted in a hierarchical organization (based on your current competence) until you reach a point where you become "incompetent" because you no longer possess the relevant skills to perform the job.
Based on the above principle, the author has framed epiphanic corollaries, offshoots etc. which substantiate his point.
1. If you – or anyone else – perform well at your job, you will get promoted, but there’s a catch. Your first promotion is likely to move you to a position that demands most of the same skills you used at your previous position. If you do well at your new job, you will get promoted again. Each time you get promoted, your new position will require fewer and fewer of the skills, perceptions, habits or managerial abilities that enabled you to shine at your first job. At some point in this cycle of recurring promotion, you will get promoted into a job for which you aren’t prepared and can’t perform. You will “rise to [your] level of incompetence.” And there you will stay.
For example, good political campaigners are seldom competent at governing. “Good followers” don’t magically become “good leaders,” and, while conformists thrive, rebels often don’t. Peter identifies the organizational problem behind this phenomenon: The people at the top, ipso facto, aren’t good at their jobs. And, the greatest fear of those at their level of incompetence atop the ladder is being found out. That’s why midlevel managers revile those who excel. If you show excellence, you threaten the hierarchy. And all hierarchies share one goal – maintaining themselves. The most necessary survival skill an employee needs is “creative incompetence,” doing enough to get by, but not enough to be offered a promotion, ever. Have you wondered why those high up in a company or bureaucracy perform their jobs so poorly? Now you know.
2. Visible Mediocrity
The Peter Principle comes with a crucial corollary: “Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.” Behaviors like “professional automatism” thwart the will and desires of competent people. Peter cautions that professional robots vest in the identifiable chores of work – such as filling out forms – rather than in the work itself. This employee or boss acts and works as if paperwork matters more than the actual task the papers describe. But the automaton knows paperwork is quantifiable. If you do all your paperwork, you might get promoted. Someone who’s really good at a job but hates paperwork doesn’t stand a chance. Superiors like “dependability, consistency” and “method.” They don’t care much for originality. Peter warns that most bosses value “internal consistency” over “efficient service
3. “Pull and Promotion”
To rise in any hierarchy, you must have pull, defined as your relationship “by blood, marriage or acquaintance” with someone above you in the hierarchy. Nobody likes anybody who gets promoted due to pull. No, wait. Nobody likes anybody else who gets promoted that way. Peter and Hull explain that when you get promoted, regardless of your pull, your advance is clearly due to your superior job skills. You gain pull by finding and influencing a patron, escaping the job ceiling above you and being ready to do whatever your patron demands. Those with the most patrons have the most pull. To play this game, never show ambition for a position above your patron’s job; make every patron feel like the most important person in your work life.
4. “Push and Promotion”
Push means being pushy. Push exists in perpetual struggle against those who have seniority. The people above you resist your push because they can. Some superiors will even admire your push but only those you can’t push you aside on your upward trajectory. Flashy self-improvement, like taking extra classes, is the most irritating, weakest form of push. Pushy people often show off “pseudo-achievements.” While such deeds can impress dim superiors, they’ll enrage your peers. Push shows greater will but less effectiveness than pull, so “never push when you can pull.”
5. “Followers and Leaders”
Having followers become leaders usually ends in disaster. When loyal, obedient, good followers become leaders they seldom “exercise leadership.” In fact, they generally make their direct reports much less efficient and “waste the time” of those above them. However, Peter and Hull note in contrast, bad followers often make excellent leaders. Take Thomas Edison; he failed as a newsboy, but once he was in charge of his own business, he changed history. When real leaders appear, fear and resentment grow. Peter calls this “hypercaninophobia,” fear of the “top dog.” The only thing worse is “hypercaninophobia complex” – fear that someone lower in the hierarchy could one day become your top dog.
6. Freud’s Analysis
The pioneering psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud – “a satirist at heart” – recognized the curse of the “Generalized Life–Incompetence Syndrome” well before other thinkers. Freud didn’t call it that, of course, but this book does. Suffering this syndrome generates tremendous levels of frustration. Freud tended to identify such frustrations as manifest in various sexual neuroses. He thought frustration springs from the impotent need to change your life’s position to something better – this might show up, for instance, as the urge to get a promotion. Never mind. Peter and Hull teach that true frustration will set in only after you achieve that promotion. You can obtain true, enduring happiness only by never being promoted beyond your natural level of competence.
7. “Hierarchiology & Politics”
The motivating thought pattern of anyone in a hierarchy is that the less those lower down get paid, the more “salaries, bonuses, dividends and fringe benefits” become available for those higher up. That’s one reason, Peter notes, that a sensible hierarchy never hires more people than it needs. However, “inefficient hierarchies” often hire more people than necessary, because they’ve promoted most of their leaders beyond their competence level, so they can’t do their jobs. Thus, people at the top hire more incompetent people to pick up the slack from existing incompetents.
8. “Life-Competence”
Being incompetent at a job, as Peter describes it, will seldom derail a career. Incompetence often guarantees career success. But what about being incompetent at life? Humankind has, through history, progressed from “caveman to fire lighter to bronze smelter to iron founder.” This means people may fool themselves into believing that humanity always will continue to progress and self-promote. Instead, Peter finds an ominous stalling in human progress, a “hierarchical regression.” This refers to the ever-increasing devaluing of the markers of merit that people once found meaningful, like high school graduation. Accordingly, due to hierarchical regression, college degrees will carry less social or job-market weight and their value will only decrease.
9. One of these illusory exceptions is when someone who is incompetent is still promoted anyway. They coin the phrase "percussive sublimation" for this phenomenon of being "kicked upstairs". But it is only a pseudo-promotion: a move from one unproductive position to another. This improves staff morale, as other employees believe that they too can be promoted again. Another pseudo-promotion is the "lateral arabesque", when a person is moved out of the way and given a longer job title.
10. An ounce of image is worth a pound of performance
11. If Tom, an incompetent Senior Marketing Consultant, is promoted to Vice President of Customer Relation Management, this promotion justifies Tom’s becoming a Senior Consultant in the first place, because this sideward shift makes it seem like he’s still competent. Additionally, his colleagues, knowing the true incompetence of Tom, might think, “Hey, if this guy got a VP position, I can too” – encouraging them to keep pushing for a promotion in vain.
A Lateral Arabesque promotes someone incompetent by offering them a shiny new job title. Take a certain Mr. Schmidt, who is now an incompetent Senior Facility Manager, even though he did the exact same job as a maintenance man. The larger the organization, the more Lateral Arabesques you’ll find.
12. The Peter Principle Key Idea #4: Look out for the common symptoms of Final Placement Syndrome.
By now you might be wondering just what’ll happen to you after you reach your final placement. When you get to your level of incompetence, you simply aren’t able to do your work. And this incompetence leads to some unpleasant maladies.
If you’ve reached your level of incompetence, you might suffer from the Final Placement Syndrome (FPS). Here are some common symptoms: Tabulatory Gigantism – the absolute need to have a bigger desk than your colleagues; or Cachinnatory Inertia – the practice of telling jokes all the time instead of working. No doubt you’ve seen a few of these cases in your own workplace.
Some doctors identified high blood pressure, peptic ulcers, insomnia, and sexual impotence as health issues for seemingly successful people – this is classic FPS. But since Final Placement isn’t recognized by the medical profession, you might run into some of the following issues.
The Peter Principle Key Idea #5: Learn to avoid or cope with your incompetence.
Given FPS, reaching your level of incompetence is definitely something to fear. But fret not! If you want to avoid the negative impacts of reaching your final placement, there are ways to ensure you never get there. Creative Incompetence is the best way to steer clear of promotions without rejecting them directly.
To be creatively incompetent, you have to create the image that you have already reached your final placement. In other words, start trying to appear slightly incompetent. This will save you from receiving those unwanted promotion offers. And it’s easier than you think! Some reliable techniques include parking your car from time to time in your boss's spot, failing to laugh at your boss’s jokes and raising uncomfortable topics at the company barbecue.
If you do reach your level of incompetence, Substitution helps you avoid FPS and continue working without the negative side effects of your final placement. One fantastic technique to substitute successfully is Perpetual Preparation, where you do everything but the actual work.
Health & happiness at Peter's Plateau - possibility or pipe dream?
Employees who have reached Peter's Plateau (their level of incompetence) can reach in several ways:
• Face the Sordid Truth (Not Recommended!) - the employee realises consciously that he has achieved final placement. But he tends to equate incompetence with laziness; he assumes he is not working hard enough, so he drives himself mercilessly. He rapidly falls victim to Final Placement Syndrome.
• Ignorance is Bliss - the employee never realises that he has reached his level of incompetence. He keeps perpetually busy, never loses his expectation of further promotion, and so remains happy and healthy. He does so by the process of Substitution: instead of carrying out the proper duties of his position, he substitutes them for some other set of duties, which he carries out to perfection. Here are several Substitution techniques:
• Technique #1: Perpetual Preparation -
• Confirm the need for action: "Better safe than sorry".
• Study alternate methods: the Substitutor will want to be sure that he chooses the most efficient course of action.
• Obtain expert advice.
• First things first - minute, painstaking, time-consuming attention to every phase of preparation for action.
• Technique #2: Side-issue specialisation -
• Technique #3: Image Replaces Performance - An ounce of image is worth a pound of performance (Peter's Placebo). Peter's Placebo is well understood by politicians.
• Technique #4: Utter Irrelevance - This is a daring technique: the Utter Irrelevantist makes not the slightest pretense of doing his job.
• Technique #5: Ephemeral Administrology - Particularly in large, complex hierarchies, an incompetent senior employee can sometimes secure temporary appointment as acting director of another division. He refrains from taking any significant action in the new post. "I can't make that decision: we must leave that for the permanent director, whenever he is appointed".
• Technique #6: Convergent Specialisation - Finding himself incompetent to carry out all the duties of his position, he simply ignores most of them and concentrates his attention and efforts on one small task.
13. Apparent exceptions
The following are apparent exceptions, but on closer examination they do not in fact violate the Principle:
The Percussive Sublimation - a hopelessly incompetent person, a bottleneck, that management kicks upstairs so as to get him out of the road.
The Lateral Arabesque - the incompetent employee is given a new and longer title and is moved to an office in a remote part of the building.
Peter's Inversion - e.g. amongst minor officials with no discretionary powers, one sees an obsessive concern with getting the forms filled out correctly, whether the forms serve any useful purpose or not. No deviation, however slight, from the customary routine will be permitted. The Peter's Invert (aka professional automaton) always obeys, never decides. This, from the viewpoint of the hierarchy, is competence, so the Peter's Invert is eligible for promotion. He will continue to rise unless some mischance places him in a post where he has to make decisions. Here he will find his level of incompetence.
Hierarchal Exfoliation - the case of the brilliant, productive worker who not only wins no promotion, but is even dismissed from his post. Indeed, in most hierarchies, super-competence is more objectionable than incompetence. Ordinary incompetence 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.
The Paternal In-Step - this is when the owner of a family business brings in his son at a high level with the idea that in time, without rising through the ranks, he should take over the supreme command ("step into his father's shoes"). There are two ways this can happen:
An existing employee is dismissed/removed to make place for the in-stepper; or
A new position, with an impressive title, is created for the in-stepper.