Few workers today perform their tasks outside of a hierarchy. Every day, we deal with a chain of command, be it in a company of five or 5,000, and there are countless horror stories attesting to the bungling, bumbling and bare-faced incompetence that runs rampant wherever hierarchies rear their heads. Which is everywhere. In offices, governmental agencies, management and academia, these senseless shenanigans threaten to drive the average worker to an unhealthy mental state—and sometimes we can only grin and bear it. Originally published in 1969, Dr. Laurence J. Peter’s “The Peter Principle” is a brilliant piece of managerial satire exploring a worthy science of his own discovery called “hierarchiology.”

Levels of Incompetence

Being accosted regularly by incompetence, in all fields and in all occupations, we may find ourselves asking: Why? What dooms us to failure? This is the first question Peter’s Principle tries to address and the answer can be found in its driving maxim:

“In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his own level of incompetence.”

To fully understand that statement, we might take a moment to consider our own hierarchies: How many times have we grit our teeth when it seemed that our superiors were much more incompetent than people in their positions had any right to be? In Peter’s Principle, our level of incompetence demonstrates the place where we cease to be promoted, because we are no longer doing our jobs well enough to merit promotion. But since we will not be demoted from a post unless we are ragingly incompetent, according to the Principle, the average worker is not working the job for which they are most qualified; but the job they can perform just well enough to not get fired.

Case in point: Take the career of a school principal. He would start out as a student, and if he demonstrated competence, move on to become a teacher. If he was only an average teacher, he would most likely never receive any significant promotions, but a highly competent teacher may eventually become the school principal. Being a good principal and a good teacher are relatively unrelated though and so there is high chance that the extraordinary teacher (the role he was most competent in) would now only be a mediocre principal. If, however, he proved to be an outstanding one, he would advance in Peter’s Principle to assistant superintendent or superintendent—until he reached the job where he was no longer outstanding enough to reach promotion.

The stage he bogs down in due to mediocrity would then be his defining “level of incompetence.”

Preserving the Hierarchy

We’ve already bashed our heads against the walls regarding rules that seemed to exist solely to inject torment into our working lives. The Peter Principle explains this phenomenon in a variety of ways, starting with the First Commandment of Hierarchical Life: The hierarchy must be preserved. Under this commandment, we can see several of Peter’s definitions at work.

Professional Automatism is how Peter defines the means sublimating the ends as the highest goal of labor. A professional automaton, as Peter himself says, “no longer sees himself as existing to serve the public: he sees the public as the raw material that serves to maintain him, the forms, the ritual and the hierarchy!” (Peter 41)

This goes back to the levels of incompetence, for we may question how slavish professional automatons get promoted to positions of importance in the first place. Peter’s Principle would say that as long as workers are in positions of competence, they evaluate work and rules in terms of output: What kind of service or product they can produce for the public. Consequently, they will evaluate their subordinates also in terms of output. A superior who has reached incompetence though will want to maintain the status quo. He or she will be evaluating subordinates more in terms of input: How smoothly they can keep the organisational machine purring by strictly adhering to the rules—even at the expense of higher and better output. These are who the book calls Peter’s Inverts.

The Dangers of Competence

Ultimately, if maintaining the balance of hierarchy becomes an organisation’s primary objective, Peter points out that competence, especially what he calls “super-competence,” becomes much more feared and persecuted than incompetence. Ordinary incompetence does not lead to a worker getting fired: It merely strands them on whatever level they are working at, and unless they reach a level of so-called “super-incompetence,” they are safe in their position and disrupt nobody. However, outstanding competence disrupts the structure by forcing everyone to rise to its level of increased output. These workers threaten the hierarchy, the establishment and Peter’s cutting Principle would have us believe that they are driven out again and again, even while ineffective workers are shielded through percussive sublimation (getting kicked up to a better job to get an incompetent out from under their foot) and lateral arabesque (providing an incompetent employee with a longer title/nicer office, but no change of duties.)

For any worker who has wanted to run screaming through the halls of their office when confronted with the inexhaustible supplies of incompetence, “The Peter Principle” is a tongue-in-cheek volume that hits close to home and reminds us that while there is little we can do to combat bungles in the greater world, we can at least look out to not get stranded on our own personal level of incompetence.

As Peter concludes: You will agree that man cannot achieve his greatest fulfillment through seeking quantity for quality’s sake: he will achieve it through improving the quality of life,in other words, through avoiding life-incompetence (Peter 167).

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