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Warren Shea

Peter Principle

Tuesday, August 13th, 2013 at 12:48 am

Just started reading about this ‘Peter Principle’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle) and I’m BLOWN AWAY.

“Employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence.” In more formal parlance, the effect could be stated as: employees tend to be given increasing authority until they cannot continue to work competently.

There are incompetent people in every work place….are they there because they’re too good for the job below them, not good enough for the job they have?
It’s crazy – I understand that I too, will be incompetent at a job eventually. I just haven’t hit the point that I’m bad (or maybe, I’ve hit it and I don’t know). But it’ll come – there are people who will rise above me just as I’ve risen above others. Maybe I’m too new to the manager gig, but I already see that I can’t be a senior manager or director or managing director. There are certain skills I don’t have….for example: A quick-wit. I’m not a morning person. My interpersonal skills are…lacking. Not awful, but not great. My public speaking is mediocre. My stress coping skills aren’t the best. My hair is too spikey.

…is middle management the further I can go as the person I am?

….what’s better, being in a lower role and good at it or being in a high role and being bad at it? I don’t think I could personally accept being bad at a role, I’d rather take a lower role and excel at it.

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Solutions:

Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda and Cesare Garofalo used an agent-based modelling approach to simulate the promotion of employees and tested alternative strategies. Although counter-intuitive, they found that the best way to improve efficiency in an enterprise is to promote people randomly, or to shortlist the best and the worst performer in a given group, from which the person to be promoted is then selected randomly.[3] This work won the 2010 Ig Nobel Prize in management science.

….WUH?!?!!? How does that work?!

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I have much to consider, this night….

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