Back to Archives
'The Peter Principle' was originally published in 1969 at a time when American corporations were the envy of the whole world. In the aftermath of diversification mania and foreign expansions, several organisations were left inundated with people and management ranks. 'Hierarchisation' had taken roots and had started spreading its tentacles all across.
'The Peter Principle' was a pseudo-collaborative effort of Dr. Raymond J. Peter and Raymond Hull. Dr. Peter, according to the book, was a social scientist who had done enormous research in studying incompetence and hierarchies, however, strangely enough, he didn't have time to write this book. Raymond Hull, an author-cum-journalist took the cue from Dr. Peter, improvised upon his work and published it in the form of 'The Peter Principle'. I found 'The Peter Principle' an above-average read. Somewhere close to 3.5 on my scale of 1 to 5. After a riveting first half, the rest of the book comes across a cocktail of repetitions, concocted theories and principles - created just to add the element of humor. I wish Raymond Hull had kept this book confined only to the core discussions of the Peter Principle even if that meant restricting the number of pages.
The Peter principle states that in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his own level of incompetence. He even goes to the extent of stating that only those workers accomplish work who haven't yet reached their level of incompetence. The point is that people are promoted for doing good work in their respective roles. And those good employees, in this race towards the top, sometimes get placed in a role that is in stark contrast to the one that helped them get promotion in the first place.
These assertions are further backed up with apparent exceptions to the Peter principle - a) percussive sublimation: a pseude promotion. This one's very common. Management often kicks an incompetent employee upstairs to a position where he could do least damage (a corollary to the Dilbert principle). Besides, such promotions firm up the morale of people and maintain the hierarchy, too, b) Lateral Arabesque - Another management trick whereby you may not get any promotion or a raise, but instead may be bestowed upon with a high-falutin title, c) Peter's Inversion - Authors use the metaphor of 'professional automatons' to explain this exception. There are often people in an organisation for whom nothing is more important than toeing the seniors' line. According to Hull these people are often managed by incompetent managers who care about sychophancy, courtesy towards bosses, etc. more than one's internal efficiency, d) Hierarchical Exfoliation - Super-competence is more objectionable than incompetence. Super-competent employees often get stuck in their ranks since they tend to disrupt the work system and e) Paternal In-step system: PIS is exhibits itself when a favored individual enters a hierarchy over others instead of starting at the bottom. In current times, this phenomena is noticed predominantly in family-driven organisations.
Chapter 4 and onwards take the readers through various manoeuvers that exist in hierarchies. Raymond Hull touches upon nearly every facet of hierarchiology. He talks about how push (employees taking vocational courses to accelerate promotions) doesn't have an edge over pull (acquaintances in top levels of hierarchy) since in the former, seniority factor is a crucial factor than academic credentials. Then, there is this chapter titled 'Health and Happiness at Zero PQ' where PQ=Promotion Quotient. Hull explains when an employee reaches his level of incompetence, more times than not, he's unaware of it and keeps on basking in the glory of his last promotion. Such employees sometimes become phenomenal in substitution techniques instead of focussing upon their KRAs. Authors, for example, mention a few of those techniques like spending awful lot of time in preparation of a task than the task itself, focusing more on side-issues, working more on one's image than performance, specialising in a narrow field of work, etc.
On balance, 'The Peter Principle' has some positives and yes, a few negatives, too. No book in my knowledge beside 'The Peter Principle' deals so thoroughly with issue of incompetence in hierarchies. You would actually identify yourself with a lot of examples in the book. I could relate to quite a few of them. As far as negatives go, I would say that author(Raymond Hull being the prime author) at times goes overboard with the hypothetical examples; in some parts, witty aphorisms seemingly suppress the rational portion. Still, I would recommend this book for its relevance to the hierarchical incompetence issues.
