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Peter principle

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Re: Peter principle

#151

Post by dudeinhawaii »

stareatgoats wrote: post #58

The "Peter principle" rests on the assumption that organizations are rational meritocracies, and will reward people that are competent at their given task. And those organizations may (still) exist, but they are not the norm, at least not in my experience. I propose another, more important, principle as an explanation for the obvious incompetence of many managers: Competent people are a source of pain to higher level…

I agree, but I think it's even more subversive. Large corporations tend to develop internal fiefdoms with rules that aren't always aligned with the larger company's objectives. These fiefdoms develop unspoken rules, which competent people tend to question. "Why are we padding every task by 75%?" "Why are we saying X tasks are 'hard' and require additional staffing when we know they're easy?" These new unspoken rules misalign rewards.

Competent individuals often question practices like these and are either coerced into submission or shown the door. This leads to a gradual subversion of the corporate culture, transforming what was once agile, resourceful, and, importantly, truthful into a culture of internal lies and self-deception. "Everyone lies on this report, so you must too. Everyone exaggerates their evaluations, so you must as well. Everyone inflates sales predictions by many multiples; you must do the same." Rewards given under the de-facto misaligned system favors the incompetent. This further estranges competence from leveling.

Re: Peter principle

#152

Post by nchallak »

stareatgoats wrote: post #58

The "Peter principle" rests on the assumption that organizations are rational meritocracies, and will reward people that are competent at their given task. And those organizations may (still) exist, but they are not the norm, at least not in my experience. I propose another, more important, principle as an explanation for the obvious incompetence of many managers: Competent people are a source of pain to higher level…

Isn't this just another definition of the original principle. People rise to the level where their noise is just enough to not worry the people promoting them i.e. the lesser their noise is the more they will be promoted. What you are offering seems like an explanation rather than a new observation.

Re: Peter principle

#153

Post by lamontcg »

hammock wrote: post #124
stareatgoats wrote: post #58

The "Peter principle" rests on the assumption that organizations are rational meritocracies, and will reward people that are competent at their given task. And those organizations may (still) exist, but they are not the norm, at least not in my experience. I propose another, more important, principle as an explanation for the obvious incompetence of many managers: Competent people are a source of pain to higher level…

At middle management levels that approach may be the way it works, because of the incentives. But once you start presenting to board rooms and people who have zero skin in the game of office politics, but 100% skin in the game of the firm’s profits (and more broadly firm profits at large), you absolutely will not succeed unless you are delivering value through competence

I've definitely worked for people who violated that rule to the detriment of the company. They could _appear_ competent, but in my view, corroborated later by the view of the market, they were actually not.

Re: Peter principle

#154

Post by Buttons840 »

rokkamokka wrote: post #81
aftoprokrustes wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is, fortunately, not my experience. In all of my jobs, the most highly regarded people, including by management, were/are those who have an informed opinion and are confident enough to voice it, and potentially take responsibilities outside of their job description in order to steer the business in the direction they are convinced is the right one. Note that this handful persons I am referring to _also_ accept c…

The other side of the coin is the needlessly defiant people. These believe themselves to be those that "have an informed opinion and are confident enough to voice it", but in reality they just disagree with everything and everyone except themselves. From a third party's point of view they're easy to discern, however.

I'm probably one of these defiant people, so I want to speak in their defense.

I really just want to be heard. I want to be heard and have a response from someone who has comprehended my point of view and fully engaged with it, but that rarely happens.

At my last job I was defiant because the company was storing plain text passwords and PPI in the test database, and every developer had access to it (I'm certain there is a reader of this comment whose password I had access to along with a good amount of PPI). I said this should be fixed but nobody really engaged with what I was saying; we had important product enhancements to work on. So I got defiant and pushed really hard and burned some of my political capital, made myself appear a trouble maker in some people's minds, and in the end the PPI was removed from the test database. This caused the test environment to break and some tests needed to be fixed. They still store plain text passwords though, because that assumption was spread throughout the code. I would have continued pushing to do the work and stop using plain text passwords, but I was laid off.

If a company prioritizes profit over ethics you will find trouble makers who are justifiably defiant. Judge for yourself how many companies do that.

Re: Peter principle

#155

Post by kbolino »

gpuhacker wrote: post #48
amackera wrote: post #36

People aren't static, nor are companies or roles within them. Treating every person as unchanging and treating the requirements of each level in the hierarchy as unchanging are just plain bad assumptions to make. People grow. Companies change. This book was meant as satire, and the fact that so many people take it as fact is honestly quite concerning.

From the wiki page: "In 2018, professors Alan Benson, Danielle Li, and Kelly Shue analyzed sales workers' performance and promotion practices at 214 American businesses to test the veracity of the Peter principle. They found that these companies tended to promote employees to a management position based on their performance in their previous position, rather than based on managerial potential. Consistent with the Pet…

The Peter Principle might be downstream of the Monotonic Pay Scale, where it is expected that a person who manages others must be paid more than any of them. Conversely, no matter how good you are or how much money you are making the business, you will reach a point where your pay is effectively capped unless you transition to management.

The government suffers from this especially, despite an ostensibly very different incentive structure. The explosion in government contractors (by which I mean, individuals indirectly employed to do jobs in lieu of direct hires) seems to be driven in no small part by this problem.

Re: Peter principle

#156

Post by Eisenstein »

P_I_Staker wrote: post #128
Eisenstein wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I wonder if Stalin had the right idea. Purge the leadership every so often to start with a clean slate. Of course this only works with bureaucracies and not things that require tons of experience. You also have to have somewhere for them to move on to if you don't want to murder them or ship them to Siberia.

Was this strategy very successful?

Successful in what regard? Stalin ended up dying of natural causes, Russia and Ukraine transformed from a backwards agrarian economy to a despotic industrial economy, the Soviet Army took a good chunk of Europe during WWII, the Soviet Union became a superpower, and during his rule it could be argued that the Soviet bureaucracy was incredibly efficient. I don't actually think we should take Stalin as a role-model for how to run a government (I was being tongue-in-cheek in my above comment) but it is amazing what you can accomplish when you have a total disregard for human rights, all of the levers of the State, a ruthless secret police, and an enormous amount of natural resources.

Re: Peter principle

#157

Post by zachmu »

stareatgoats wrote: post #58

The "Peter principle" rests on the assumption that organizations are rational meritocracies, and will reward people that are competent at their given task. And those organizations may (still) exist, but they are not the norm, at least not in my experience. I propose another, more important, principle as an explanation for the obvious incompetence of many managers: Competent people are a source of pain to higher level…

You're confusing competence with disagreeability.

Re: Peter principle

#158

Post by OhMeadhbh »

fsckboy wrote: post #132
OhMeadhbh wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

_considered_ for the rank of field marshal. i did not imply he was promoted to field marshal. and even then, it was very likely just a joke.

well then you should have implied it because he was promoted to a rank equivalent to field marshall, 5 star general. (neither rank existed at the time, and when the rank was created, "field marshall" was eschewed as a name for it)

it would have been inaccurate to say George Marshall was promoted to Field Marshal, because he wasn't. He was promoted to General of the Army. It's sort of like saying someone who was promoted to Gunner in the Marines is a Chief Warrant Officer. The two are equivalent in rank, but very different roles in their organizations. And if you referred to a Navy Captain as a Colonel, people would look at you funny, even though the two are considered equivalent rank.

Re: Peter principle

#159

Post by creamyhorror »

dijit wrote: post #66

I'm much more compelled by the "Gervais Principle" from 2009: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-... Basically, instead of people being promoted to incompetence; the IC level is thought of as "economic losers"; IE: the exploited. People who are exploited and throw a lot of effort in are considered "the clueless" and occupy most middle management, and the high leadership of every company is co…

I'm surprised to find this so far down. The Gervais Principle is the cynical cousin of the Peter Principle, and even if it isn't actually accurate for some workplaces, it makes for a compelling read.

Re: Peter principle

#160

Post by dragonwriter »

OhMeadhbh wrote: post #25

George Marshall who was, among other things, Chief of Staff of the Army during WWII was lauded for his policy of yanking commanding generals if they didn't adapt to new positions quickly. But he lessened the stigma of being relieved by transferring them to other commands, still at flag rank. Several commanders early in '42 were removed from commanding infantry divisions, but were given commands of units in combat sup…

> He is also the only person in the US Army to be considered for the rank of Field Marshall, mostly because FDR thought it would be funny to have Field Marshal Marshall.

Considering that when the 5-star rank (General of the Army) to which he was promoted had three other people promoted to it at the same time, if he was considered for promotion to Field Marshal but they ended up choosing a different name for the rank, he probably wasn't the only one.

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