Laurence Johnston Peter (1919-1990), a Canadian educator and *hierarchiologist. The world’s best football player might be a terrible team manager, a gifted engineer without interpersonal skills will perform badly if you promote him or her into management. Just because people did well in one job does not necessarily mean they will excel if you promote them. Some people say that in the Peter Principle, people rise to their level of maximum competence, while others call it ‘their level of incompetence’.Īccording to the theory, as individuals are promoted, they gradually and progressively become less effective because top performance in one job does not necessarily mean there will be similar performance in another. Once they reach that maximum level of competence, there is no further promotion and they remain in that job working incompetently. Peter principle – Management concept by Laurence J.The Peter Principle is a concept that members of a hierarchy are promoted until they reach their limit, as far as their competence is concerned.An earlier formulation of this effect was known as Putt's Law. Unlike the Peter principle, the promoted individuals were not particularly good at any job they previously held, so placing them in a supervisory position is a way to quietly remove them from the workforce without actually firing them, rather than a reward for meritorious service.

The Dilbert principle, by contrast, assumes that hierarchy just serves as a means for removing the incompetent to 'higher' positions where they will be unable to cause damage to the workflow, assuming that the upper echelons of an organization have little relevance to its actual production, and that the majority of real, productive work in a company is done by people lower in the power ladder. Peter explains 'percussive sublimation', the act of kicking a person upstairs (i.e., promoting him to management) to get him out of the way of productive employees. In his book, The Peter Principle, Laurence J. It concludes that due to this, a competent employee will eventually be promoted to, and then remain at, a position at which he or she is incompetent. As opposed to the Dilbert principle, the Peter principle assumes that people are promoted because they are competent, and that the tasks higher up in the hierarchy require skills or talents they do not possess. The Dilbert principle can be compared to the Peter principle. The book has sold more than a million copies and was on the New York Times bestseller list for 43 weeks.Īdams' presentation of the principle is satirical-facetious but also addressing a real-world concern. In the book, Adams writes that, in terms of effectiveness, use of the Dilbert principle is akin to a band of gorillas choosing an alpha-squirrel to lead them by an incredibly convoluted process. Adams then expanded his study of the Dilbert principle in his 1996 book The Dilbert Principle, which is required or recommended reading at some management and business programs. That principle was literally happening everywhere.Īdams explained the principle in a 1995 Wall Street Journal article. Your heart surgeons and your computer programmers-your smart people-aren't in management.

You want them ordering the doughnuts and yelling at people for not doing their assignments-you know, the easy work. I wrote The Dilbert Principle around the concept that in many cases the least competent, least smart people are promoted, simply because they’re the ones you don't want doing actual work. In the Dilbert strip of February 5, 1995, Dogbert says that 'leadership is nature's way of removing morons from the productive flow'.

Peter principle meaning