Some guiding principles of human behavior are...
Some guiding principles of human behavior are written through trial and error--mostly error
Laurence J. Peter, author of the Peter Principle--”In a hierarchy individuals tend to rise to their levels of incompetence”--has brought out a new book called “Why Things Go Wrong, or The Peter Principle Revisited.”
He not only assures us that the principle is still at work in our society, but tells us how he managed to escape it himself in one of the fields where it thrives--education.
When he became a professor of education at USC in 1966, he had endless opportunities to rise above his own level of competence and become a victim of his own principle.
” . . . At this final level I felt fulfilled . . . . “ So, naturally, when his immediate superior was transferred, he was offered a promotion to department head. He declined. But he was pressured. He felt stress. What to do?
He decided to try “creative incompetence--the technique of being deliberately incompetent in something completely irrelevant to your area of accomplishment.” The purpose, of course, is to convince your superior that while you are competent in your present position, you are unworthy of promotion.
Peter simply parked his car for a week in the dean’s parking space. The offers of promotion stopped.
Then, unfortunately, he received a prestigious research award that brought renewed efforts to promote him. Again he fell back on creative incompetence.
When the dean came by his office to consult him on a technical matter, he reached into a desk drawer, took out a dart and aimed it at a target on the wall. He wrote down the number the dart had impaled, made a rapid calculation, and gave the dean the answer to his question. “He never seemed to catch on that I had known the answer all along.”
Once again, the offer of promotion was withdrawn.
But he wasn’t out of the woods yet. He realized, at a staff meeting called to select a new department chairman, that everyone had agreed on him.
“The situation called for desperate measures. In silence I looked around the room and into the pleading eyes of each of my co-workers. I gazed at the ceiling as if expecting the answer to come from Above. I got up slowly and walked to the window, took out a cigarette and then a magnifying glass. I focused the sun’s rays on the end of the cigarette and patiently waited until the tobacco ignited. Placing the cigarette between my lips, I took a puff and slowly exhaled a thin stream of smoke. All eyes were on me as I walked calmly back to my seat . . . . “
After a long silence, the chairman cleared his throat and suggested that they move on to the next item of business.
Creative incompetence had once again saved Peter from promotion to the level of his incompetence.
The publishing business itself is full of incompetents, as Peter found out when he tried to get his first book on the Peter Principle published. The first rejection letter stated, in part, “I regret to say that I can foresee no commercial possibilities for such a book. . . . “
It was rejected by 13 publishers. Some claimed they couldn’t tell whether Peter was being serious or humorous. Peter explained that the book was satire. One publisher replied, “I don’t think it’s satire. I think you are serious.”
What could more poignantly have proved the Peter Principle than a publisher who didn’t understand that satire was a literary form in which the message was serious and the method was humor.
Finally, through a satirical piece he wrote for The Times, Peter caught the eye of Lawrence Hughes, president of William Morrow & Co., and the book was published.
It was No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list for six months and was translated and published in 37 foreign editions.
In the new book Peter gives credit to Murphy’s Law and Parkinson’s Law, which, along with the Peter Principle, describe the human condition in the technological age.
Murphy’s Law, he recalls, was enunciated by Capt. Edward A. Murphy Jr., a development engineer at Wright Field. He had designed a harness to be worn by John Paul Stapp in a rocket sled speed test, and the harness failed because a technician had wired it the wrong way.
“There are only two ways to wire a strain gauge,” Murphy said--”the right way and 90 degrees from the right way.” He added that if there was any way for a technician to wire it the wrong way, he would.
This remark was overheard by George E. Nichols, a Northrop project manager, who perpetuated it in technical publications as “Murphy’s Law,” and today it pervades the English-speaking world as, “Whatever can go wrong will go wrong.’
Murphy, by the way, never made a nickel out of it.
Prof. C. Northcote Parkinson published an article in the Economist of London on Nov. 19, 1955, noting that “work expands to fill the time available for its completion.”
He discovered this principle while investigating the British Admiralty and the Colonial Office; but anyone who has ever worked for a corporation, an educational institution, a bureaucracy or the military knows the truth of it.
Peter devotes a chapter to the military, which is the end result of all three principles.
One item, from the dozens he quotes, seems to sum it up: “In a private Pentagon dining room, 126 admirals eat their lunches. The cost is $31 per lunch, and each lunch is subsidized $26.98 worth by the taxpayers.”
And most of those admirals, I suspect, are at least one rung above their level of competence.
