Peter principle

Based on Wikipedia: Peter principle

Here's a dark truth about every organization you've ever worked for: the people running it have probably risen precisely to the point where they don't know what they're doing anymore.

Think about your last terrible boss. Chances are, they weren't always terrible. They were probably quite good at something once—something that earned them their promotion. The problem is that being good at one job has almost nothing to do with being good at the next one up the ladder.

This is the Peter Principle, and once you see it, you can't unsee it.

The Idea That Started as a Joke

In 1969, a Canadian educator named Laurence J. Peter published a book with his collaborator Raymond Hull that was meant to be satire. The Peter Principle landed on bookshelves as a comedy about organizational dysfunction—except nobody laughed. Instead, readers nodded grimly in recognition. The joke was too true to be funny.

The principle works like this: In any hierarchy, employees get promoted based on their performance in their current role. A brilliant engineer becomes a team lead. A star salesperson becomes a sales manager. A gifted teacher becomes a principal. Each promotion continues until the person reaches a role they're not good at. And then—crucially—the promotions stop.

Peter called this final destination the "Peter Plateau." It's where incompetence meets job security.

The math is merciless. Given enough time and enough rungs on the ladder, every competent person will eventually climb to a position beyond their abilities. Peter's corollary states the inevitable conclusion: "In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties."

If that sounds pessimistic, wait. It gets worse.

Why Being Great at Your Job Is Actually a Career Problem

The cruel irony of the Peter Principle is that your greatest professional strength becomes the very thing that dooms you. The better you are at your current job, the faster you'll be promoted out of it and into something you might be terrible at.

Consider a school teacher who's extraordinary with children. She understands how they think, can explain complex ideas simply, and creates a classroom where learning feels like play. Her reward? Promotion to assistant principal, where she now spends her days managing schedules and mediating disputes between adults. She's competent at this too—she's good with people generally. So she gets promoted again, to principal.

Now she's attending school board meetings, navigating district politics, managing budgets, and interfacing with the superintendent. These skills have nothing to do with teaching children. She might be awful at all of them. But she's a principal now, and unless she's spectacularly bad, she'll stay one.

The skills that made her excellent at one level became irrelevant at the next.

The Book Nobody Was Supposed to Take Seriously

Peter and Hull's original book is a strange artifact—a work of deadpan humor that accidentally became a management classic. Hull wrote nearly all the text based on Peter's academic research, which is why the principle bears Peter's name and not Hull's. The book reads like a field guide to organizational absurdity, complete with made-up terminology that sounds just plausible enough to be real management jargon.

Take "percussive sublimation," their term for being kicked upstairs. This is what happens when someone is so incompetent that keeping them in place would be embarrassing, but firing them is inconvenient. So they get a pseudo-promotion—a fancy new title, perhaps an office with a slightly better view, but no actual responsibility and certainly no path forward. Everyone pretends this is a reward while quietly routing all real work around them.

Then there's the "lateral arabesque," where an incompetent employee gets moved sideways and given an impressively long job title to compensate for their utter uselessness. Vice President of Strategic Initiative Coordination, for instance.

These terms were jokes. They've since appeared in serious management literature.

The Two Ways Up—And Why Only One Works

Peter and Hull identified two paths to promotion: push and pull.

Push is what most hardworking employees try. You show up early, stay late, take courses, earn certifications, volunteer for extra projects. You push yourself forward through sheer effort and demonstrated competence. The problem? The people directly above you aren't going anywhere. They've already reached their own Peter Plateaus. The ladder is jammed, and all your pushing just makes you tired.

Pull is different. Pull means having a mentor or patron who reaches down and yanks you up. Someone with power who has decided you're worth investing in. This works far better than push, but it has its own problems—namely, your patron might be pulling you toward their own level of incompetence, or might themselves be promoted away, leaving you without support.

Neither path, of course, addresses the fundamental issue: promotion doesn't test whether you'll be good at the job you're being promoted into.

When Competence Becomes a Firing Offense

Here's where Peter's observations turn genuinely dark. In most organizations, incompetence merely stalls your career. You hit your plateau and stay there, harmlessly mediocre. But there are two categories that get people fired: "super-incompetence" and, surprisingly, "super-competence."

Super-incompetence is obvious. If you're bad enough to disrupt the entire operation, you'll be removed. But super-competence? That's the interesting case.

Peter gave the example of a special education teacher who was phenomenally effective. After one year, her students had exceeded all expectations in reading and mathematics. She was fired. The reason? She had neglected to spend sufficient time on bead-stringing and finger-painting—activities the school considered important regardless of whether students were learning anything.

The super-competent person threatens the hierarchy itself. They make their superiors look bad by comparison. They solve problems that others have declared unsolvable, implicitly criticizing everyone who failed before them. They disrupt the comfortable equilibrium where everyone knows their place and nobody is expected to perform miracles.

Organizations often find it easier to remove an outstanding performer than to reckon with what their success reveals about everyone else.

The Blindness of the Plateau

Perhaps the most unsettling of Peter's observations is that people who reach their level of incompetence almost never realize it. They lack insight into their own situation. This isn't willful denial—it's a structural blind spot.

Think about it: every previous promotion told them they were good enough to advance. Their entire career has been a series of validations. Why would this time be different? The skills that got them here must be the skills they need, right?

Wrong. But by the time they realize this, they've forgotten what it felt like to be good at their job. Competence becomes a distant memory, replaced by coping strategies and workarounds.

Peter noted that people who reach their plateau and recognize their predicament tend to be miserable—they know they're in over their heads but can't go back. Those who remain blissfully unaware of their incompetence, however, can actually be quite content. Ignorance, in this case, really is bliss.

Creative Incompetence: Gaming the System

Is there any escape? Peter devoted an entire chapter to what he called "Creative Incompetence"—the art of avoiding promotion by appearing just incompetent enough to be passed over, while still doing your actual job well.

This is a delicate balance. You need to cultivate a reputation for some harmless inadequacy that makes management hesitant to promote you, without actually impairing your work. Perhaps you're terrible at presentations but excellent at analysis. Perhaps you have an unfortunate habit of wearing the wrong clothes to important meetings. Perhaps you're chronically late but produce brilliant work.

The key is choosing a weakness that disqualifies you from the spotlight without disqualifying you from employment. It's a form of professional camouflage, hiding your competence behind a screen of strategic minor failures.

Peter was clear that this approach only works if you're not married or otherwise accountable to someone who expects you to climb the ladder. The social pressure to advance is enormous, and creative incompetence requires a willingness to disappoint people who believe in you.

Historical Echoes and Modern Proof

Peter wasn't the first to notice this pattern. The German playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing wrote a comedy in 1763 featuring an army sergeant who refuses promotion, saying "I am a good sergeant; I might easily make a bad captain, and certainly an even worse general. One knows from experience."

The Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, writing in the early 1800s, observed that "there is nothing more common than to hear of men losing their energy on being raised to a higher position, to which they do not feel themselves equal."

And the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset essentially stated the Peter Principle outright in 1910: "All public employees should be demoted to their immediately lower level, as they have been promoted until turning incompetent."

But modern research has moved beyond philosophical observation to actual data. In 2018, professors from the University of Minnesota and Yale analyzed promotion practices at 214 American companies. Their findings were striking: firms consistently promoted salespeople to management based on their sales performance—despite sales ability having almost nothing to do with management ability. High-performing salespeople who became managers performed measurably worse than their colleagues, causing substantial costs to the businesses.

The Peter Principle isn't just a clever idea. It's an empirically verified phenomenon that costs companies real money.

Random Promotion: A Surprisingly Good Idea

In 2010, three Italian physicists won an Ig Nobel Prize—the satirical award for research that "first makes people laugh, then makes them think"—for a study on the Peter Principle. Using computer simulations, they found that the best way to improve organizational efficiency was to promote people at random.

Let that sink in. Random promotion outperforms merit-based promotion.

The reason is mathematical. When you promote based on past performance, you're systematically selecting for people who've hit a statistical peak. Their extraordinary results likely combined genuine skill with lucky circumstances that won't repeat in a new role. Random selection avoids this trap by not pretending that past success predicts future success in an unrelated job.

The same researchers won a second Ig Nobel Prize in 2022 for demonstrating why success is more often a result of luck than talent—a finding that undermines the entire premise of meritocratic promotion.

The Dilbert Variation

Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip Dilbert, was inspired by the Peter Principle to formulate his own theory: the Dilbert Principle. While Peter argued that competent people get promoted until they become incompetent, Adams suggested something more cynical—that obviously incompetent people get promoted specifically to get them out of the workflow.

In Peter's world, a great engineer becomes a mediocre manager because engineering skill doesn't transfer to management. In Adams' world, a terrible engineer becomes a manager because keeping them away from actual work minimizes the damage they can do.

The Dilbert Principle is, in economist João Ricardo Faria's analysis, "a sub-optimal version of the Peter Principle." It leads to even worse outcomes because at least under the Peter Principle, promoted people were once good at something. Under the Dilbert Principle, they were never good at anything—and now they're in charge.

The Paula Principle: When the Ladder Is Rigged

Some researchers have observed a gendered pattern they call the Paula Principle: women, unlike men, tend to get stuck below their level of competence rather than above it. Where men are promoted until they're incompetent, women are often not promoted at all despite being fully capable.

The name is a play on the apostles Peter and Paul, but the phenomenon is serious. If the Peter Principle describes a ceiling created by the limits of individual capability, the Paula Principle describes a ceiling created by systemic bias—one that keeps qualified women from advancing regardless of their demonstrated competence.

This discrimination isn't limited to executive positions. Studies suggest it affects all hierarchical levels, creating a parallel universe where equally talented women cluster in lower positions while equally limited men cluster in higher ones.

What Organizations Have Tried

Companies know about the Peter Principle. Some have designed their promotion systems to counteract it.

One approach is to expect regression to the mean—to assume that anyone's performance will drop after promotion and factor this into hiring decisions. This is pessimistic but perhaps realistic.

More aggressive is the "up or out" system, famously used by the law firm Cravath, Swaine and Moore. At Cravath, associates who don't make partner within a certain timeframe are let go. There's no Peter Plateau because the organization refuses to let anyone stay in place. You advance or you leave.

This system has its own problems—it burns through talent and creates intense competition—but it does prevent organizations from accumulating barnacles of incompetence.

Computer scientists Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths have proposed a gentler alternative borrowed from network congestion algorithms: a dynamic hierarchy where employees are regularly either promoted or demoted based on performance. Rather than firing people who plateau, you move them back down to where they were effective. This sounds humane in theory, though the psychological toll of regular demotions might be considerable.

The Species-Level Question

In the final chapter of his book, Peter asked a disturbing question: Does the Peter Principle apply to humanity as a species? Have we, through technological advancement, promoted ourselves to a level of collective incompetence from which there's no return?

Consider: We evolved to handle immediate, tangible problems—finding food, building shelter, navigating social groups of a few dozen people. Now we're responsible for managing global supply chains, preventing nuclear war, and not destroying our own climate. These challenges require capacities that evolution never selected for.

As a species, we may have been promoted beyond our competence.

Peter didn't answer his own question—he just posed it. But the fact that a satirical book about organizational dysfunction ends with existential dread about human extinction tells you something about how seriously the joke had gotten by 1969.

Learning to See the Plateau

The Peter Principle is uncomfortable because it suggests that our institutions are structurally doomed to fill with people who can't do their jobs. It implies that competence is temporary, that success contains the seeds of failure, and that the very mechanisms we use to reward excellence systematically destroy it.

But there's a strange comfort in the theory too. That terrible boss you had? Not a monster—just someone who was probably excellent at something else once. That executive making baffling decisions? Not malicious—just promoted past their understanding. The dysfunction you see everywhere? Not a sign that people are fundamentally bad—just a predictable outcome of a system that promotes people based on the wrong criteria.

Understanding the Peter Principle doesn't fix it. But it does explain why organizations feel the way they do—and why, perhaps, the rare competent leader should be treasured rather than expected.

Peter and Hull meant to write a comedy. They accidentally wrote a diagnosis.