Happy Birthday Peter Principal

Happy 40th birthday to the Peter Principle. This is the concept which one is promoted into a job that they cannot do, creating a broad range of organizational incompetence. It is a simple concept really. Someone does a good job and they get promoted into another job. If they are successful in that job, they may get promoted again. However, if they fail or do poorly at that job, no more promotions; they just stay in a job doing marginal work. They’ve reached their level of incompetence. We’ve all seen this happen again and again. We might call it “promotional Darwinism.”

One of my most interesting managers was Arnie. He supervised a portion of a New Jersey school supply distribution center where I spent the summer or our bicentennial year schlepping cartons of construction and manila paper. The company hired more than 400 college kids for the summer and after a few years in industry I realized why they ran it like a prison. But that is another story.

On my first day I reported to the security office and Arnie was paged. A small white haired compact man approached me, wearing a white shirt, gray slacks, and a blue tie, the same “uniform” he’d wear every day that summer. He extended cordially extended his hand and said in a gruff voice, “Hi, my name is Arnie M— and I want no $^%$%#@ around.” Boom! Welcome to summer in a hot Jersey warehouse.

Arnie ran a tight ship. He sat a small desk with a transistor radio tuned to WNEW, a mainstream NYC radio station. He made sure you picked the next order in the queue, and not the easy ones. He did not communicate very well and made it clear that he was not our friend. He’d occasionally grunt “good night boys” when we lined up to punch out but that was it. I think I did see him smile once when chatting with some of the full time guys, but he seemed to just tolerate us summer interlopers as a necessary evil.

Was Arnie a victim of the Peter Principle? Perhaps. But on reflection he was just a manager doing his job. And thinking back, I think he did it well. Interesting what a few decades of perspective can do.