The Peter Principle (12 page)

An academician who is incompetent to understand the meaning and value of a literary work may write a treatise titled, “A Comparative Study of the Use of the Comma in the Literary Works of Otto Scribbler.”

Substitution Recommended

The examples I have cited, and others that doubtless occurred to you, show that, from the employee’s point of view,
Substitution
is far and away the most satisfactory adjustment to final placement.

The achievement of an effective
Substitution
will usually prevent the development of the Final Placement Syndrome, and allow the employee to work out the rest of his career, healthy and self-satisfied, at his level of incompetence.

CHAPTER 14
Creative Incompetence

“Always do one thing less than you think you can do.”

B. M. B
ARUCH

D
OES MY EXPOSITION
of the Peter Principle seem to you like a philosophy of despair? Do you shrink from the thought that final placement, with its wretched physical and psychological symptoms, must be the end of every career? Empathizing with these questions, I should like to present the reader with a knife that allows him to cut through this philosophical Gordian knot.

Better to Light a Single Candle than to Curse the Edison Co.

“Surely,” you may say, “a person can simply refuse to accept promotion, and stay working happily at a job he can do competently.”

An Interesting Example

The blunt refusal of an offered promotion is known as Peter’s Parry. To be sure, it sounds easy enough. Yet I have discovered only one instance of its successful use.

T. Sawyer, a carpenter employed by the Beamish Construction Company, was so hard-working, competent and conscientious that he was several times offered the post of foreman.

Sawyer respected his boss and would have liked to oblige him. Yet he was happy as a rank-and-file carpenter. He had no worries: he could forget the job at 4:30
P.M.
each day.

He knew that, as a foreman, he would spend his evenings and weekends worrying about the next day’s and the next week’s work. So he steadily refused the promotion.

Sawyer, it is worth noting, was an unmarried man with no close relatives and few friends. He could act as he pleased.

Not So Easy for Most of Us

For most people, Peter’s Parry is impracticable. Consider the case of B. Loman, a typical citizen and family man, who refused a promotion.

His wife at once began to nag him. “Think of your children’s future! What would the neighbours say if they knew? If you loved me, you’d want to get ahead!” and so on.

To find out for sure what the neighbours would say, Mrs. Loman confided the cause of her chagrin to a few trusted friends. The news spread around the district. Loman’s young son, trying to defend his father’s honor, fought one of his schoolmates and knocked out two of the other boy’s teeth. The resulting litigation and dental bills cost Loman eleven hundred dollars.

Loman’s mother-in-law worked Mrs. Loman’s feelings up to such a pitch that she left him and secured a judicial separation. In his loneliness, disgrace and despair, he committed suicide.

No, refusing promotion is no easy route to happiness and health. I saw, early in my researches that, for most people,
Peter’s Parry does not pay!

An Illuminating Observation

While studying hierarchal structure and promotion rates among the production and clerical workers of the Ideal Trivet Company, I noticed that the grounds around the Trivet Building were beautifully landscaped and maintained. The velvety lawns and jewel-like flower beds suggested a high level of horticultural competence. I found that P. Greene, the gardener, was a happy, pleasant man with a genuine affection for his plants and a respect for his tools. He was doing what he liked best, gardening.

He was competent in all aspects of his work except one: he nearly always lost or mislaid receipts and delivery slips for goods received by his department, although he managed requisitions quite well.

The lack of delivery slips upset the accounting department, and Greene was several times reprimanded by the manager. His replies were vague.

“I think I may have planted the papers along with the shrubs.”

“Maybe the mice in the potting shed got at the papers.”

Because of this incompetence in paperwork, when a new maintenance foreman was required, Greene was not considered for the post.

I interviewed Greene several times. He was courteous and co-operative, but insisted that he lost the documents accidentally. I questioned his wife. She told me that Greene kept comprehensive records for his home gardening operations, and could calculate the cost of everything produced in his yard or greenhouse.

A Parallel Case?

I interviewed A. Messer, shop foreman at Cracknell Casting and Foundry Company, whose little office seemed to be in grotesque disorder. Nevertheless, my time-and-motion study showed that the tottering piles of old account and reference books, the cardboard cartons bursting with tattered work sheets, the cabinets overflowing with unindexed files and the sheaves of long-disused plans pinned to the walls were really not a part of Messer’s basically efficient operation.

I could not tell whether he was or was not consciously using this untidiness to camouflage his competence, in order to avoid promotion to general foreman.

Madness in His Method?

J. Spellman was a competent schoolteacher. His professional reputation was high, yet he never got the offer of a vice-principalship. I wondered why, and began to make inquiries.

A senior official told me, “Spellman neglects to cash his pay checks. Every three months we have to remind him that we would like him to cash his checks, so that we can keep the books straight. I just can’t understand a person who doesn’t cash his checks.”

I questioned further.

“No, no! We don’t distrust him,” was the reply. “But naturally one wonders whether he has some private source of income.”

I asked, “Do you suspect that he might be involved in some illegal activities?”

“Certainly not! We don’t have a shred of evidence against him. A fine teacher! A good man! A sterling reputation!”

Despite these disclaimers, I drew the inference that the hierarchy cannot trust a man who manages his finances so well that he does not rush to the bank and cash or deposit his pay check in order to cover his bills. Spellman, in short, had shown himself incompetent to behave as the typical employee is expected to behave; hence he had made himself ineligible for promotion.

Was it
only
coincidence that Spellman was happy in his teaching work, and had no desire for promotion to administrative duties?

Is There a Pattern?

I investigated many similar cases of what seemed to be deliberate incompetence, but I could never certainly decide whether the behavior was the result of conscious planning, or of a subconscious motivation.

One thing was clear: these employees had avoided advancement, not by refusing promotion—we have already seen how disastrous that can be—but by contriving never to be offered a promotion!

Eureka!

This is an infallible way to
avoid the ultimate promotion;
this is
the key to health and happiness
at work and in private life; this is
Creative Incompetence.

A Proven Policy

It does not matter whether Greene, Messer, Spellman and other employees similarly situated are consciously or unconsciously avoiding the ultimate promotion. What does matter is that we can learn from them how to achieve this vitally important goal. (“Vitally important” is no figure of speech: the correct technique may save your life.)

The method boils down to this:
create the impression that you have already reached your level of incompetence.

You do this by exhibiting one or more of the non-medical symptoms of final placement.

Greene the gardener was exhibiting a mild form of Papyrophobia. Messer, the foundry foreman, to a casual observer, seemed to be an Advanced Papyromaniac. Spellman the schoolteacher, procrastinating over the deposit of his pay checks, showed a severe, though unusual, form of the Teeter-Totter Syndrome.

Creative Incompetence will achieve best results if you choose an area of incompetence
which does not directly hinder you in carrying out the main duties of your present position.

Some Subtle Techniques

For a clerical worker, such an unspectacular habit as leaving one’s desk drawers open at the end of the working day will, in some hierarchies, have the desired effect.

A show of niggling, officious economy—the switching off of lights, turning off of taps, picking up paper clips and rubber bands off the floor and out of wastebaskets, to the accompaniment of muttered homilies on the value of thrift—is another effective maneuver.

Stand Out from the Crowd

Refusal to pay one’s share of the firm’s or department’s Social Fund; refraining from drinking coffee at the official coffee break; bringing one’s own lunch to a job where everyone else eats out; persistent turning off of radiators and opening of windows; refusing contributions to collections for wedding and retirement gifts; a mosaic of stand-offish eccentricity (the Diogenes Complex) will create just the modicum of suspicion and distrust which disqualifies you for promotion.

A
UTOMOTIVE
T
ACTICS
One highly successful department manager avoided promotion by occasionally parking his car in the space reserved for the company president.

Another executive always drove a car one year older, and five hundred dollars cheaper in original price, than the cars of his peers.

P
ERSONAL
A
PPEARANCE
Most people agree
in principle
with the dictum that fine feathers don’t make fine birds, but
in practice
an employee is judged by his appearance. Here, then, is ample scope for Creative Incompetence.

The wearing of unconventional or
slightly
shabby clothes, irregularity of bathing,
occasional
neglect of haircutting or
occasional
carelessness in shaving (the
small
but conspicuous wound dressing adjoining a
small
blob of congealed blood, or the
small
patch of stubble missed by the razor) are useful techniques.

Ladies may wear
a shade too much
or
too little
makeup, possibly combined with the
occasional
wearing of an unbecoming or inappropriate hair style. Overly strong perfume and overly brilliant jewelry work well in many cases.

M
ORE
R
EAL
-L
IFE
E
XAMPLES
Here, for your guidance and inspiration, are some superb instances of Creative Incompetence which I have observed
1
in my studies.

Mr. F. proposed to the boss’s daughter at the firm’s annual Founder’s Birthday Party. The girl had just graduated from a European finishing school, and F. had never seen her before that occasion. Naturally, he did not get the daughter and naturally, too, he rendered himself ineligible for promotion.

Miss L. of the same firm, contrived to offend the boss’s wife at the same party by imitating the older woman’s peculiar laugh within her hearing.

Mr. P. got a friend to make
one
fake threatening phone call to him at the office. Within earshot and sight of his colleagues P. reacted dramatically, begged for “mercy” and “more time” and pleaded, “Don’t tell my wife. If she finds out this will kill her.” Was this just one of P.’s typically stupid jokes, or was it an inspired piece of Creative Incompetence?

An Old Friend Revisited

I recently reviewed the case of T. Sawyer, the carpenter whose successful use of Peter’s Parry I described at the beginning of this chapter.

In the last few months he has been buying cheap paperbound copies of
Walden
2
and giving them away to his workmates and superiors, in each case with a few remarks on the pleasures of irresponsibility and the joys of day labor.

He follows up the gift with persistent questioning to see whether the recipient has read the book and how much of it he has understood. This meddlesome didacticism I denominate
The Socrates Complex.

Sawyer reports that the offers of promotion have ceased. I naturally felt a little disappointment at the disappearance of the only living example of a
successful
Peter’s Parry (successful in the sense that it had averted proffered promotion without causing him unhappiness). Yet this disappointment was counterbalanced by pleasure at seeing an elegant proof of the fact that

Creative Incompetence Beats Peter’s Parry—Every Time!

An Important Precaution

A thoughtful study of Chapter 12 will give you plenty of ideas for developing your own form of Creative Incompetence. Yet I must emphasize the paramount importance of
concealing the fact that you want to avoid promotion!

As camouflage, you may even indulge in the occasional mild
grumble
to your peers: “Darned funny how
some
people get promotion in this place, while others are passed over!”

Dare You Do It?

If you have not yet attained final placement on Peter’s Plateau, you can discover an irrelevant incompetence.

Find it and practice it diligently. It will keep you at a level of competence and so assure you of the keen personal satisfaction of regularly accomplishing some useful work.

Surely creative incompetence offers as great a challenge as the traditional drive for higher rank!

CHAPTER 15
The Darwinian Extension

“The meek . . . shall inherit the earth.”

J
ESUS OF
N
AZARETH

I
N DISCUSSING COMPETENCE
and incompetence we have so far dealt mainly with vocational problems—with the toils and stratagems men use to make a living in a complex, industrialized society.

This chapter will apply the Peter Principle to a broader issue, to the question of
life-competence.
Can the human race hold its position, or advance, in the evolutionary hierarchy?

The Peterian Interpretation
of History

Man has achieved many promotions in the life-hierarchy. Each promotion thus far—from tree dweller to caveman, to fire lighter, to flint knapper, to stone polisher, to bronze smelter, to iron founder and so on—has increased his prospects of survival as a species.

The more conceited members of the race think in terms of an endless ascent—or promotion
ad infinitum.
I would point out that, sooner or later,
man must reach his level of life-incompetence.

Two things could prevent this happening: that there should not be enough time available, or not enough ranks in the hierarchy. But, so far as we can ascertain, there is infinite time ahead of us (whether we are here to take advantage of it or not), and there are an infinite number of ranks in existence or in potential (various religions have described whole hierarchies of angels, demigods and gods above the present level of humanity).

Other species have achieved many promotions, only to reach their levels of life-incompetence. The dinosaur, the saber-toothed tiger, the pterodactyl, the mammoth developed and flourished by virtue of certain qualities—bulk, fangs, wings, tusks. But the very qualities which at first assured their promotion eventually brought about their incompetence. We might say that
competence always contains the seed of incompetence.
General Goodwin’s vulgar bonhomie, Miss Ditto’s unoriginality, Mr. Driver’s dominant personality—
these were the qualities which gained them promotion; these same qualities eventually barred them from further promotion!
So various animal species, after eons of steady promotion, have reached the levels of incompetence and have become static, or have achieved super-incompetence and have become extinct.

This has happened to many human societies and civilizations. Some people who flourished in colonial status, under the tutelage of stronger nations, have proved incompetent when promoted to self-government. Other nations that competently ruled themselves as city-states, republics or monarchies, have proved incompetent to survive as imperial powers. Civilizations that thrived on adversity and hardship proved incompetent to stand the strains of success and affluence.

What of the human race as a whole?
Cleverness
is the quality which has won for mankind promotion after promotion. Will that cleverness prove a bar to further promotion? Will it even reduce mankind to the condition of super-incompetence (see Chapter 3) and thus ensure his speedy dismissal from the life-hierarchy?

Two Ominous Signs

1. Hierarchal Regression

It is through the schools that society begins its task of molding and training the new members of the human race. I have already examined a typical school system as it concerns the teachers who staff it. Now let us look at school as it affects the pupils.

The old-fashioned school system was a pure expression of the Peter Principle. A pupil was promoted, grade by grade, until he reached his level of incompetence. Then he was said to have “failed” Grade 5 or 8 or 11, etc. He would have to “repeat the grade”; that is, he would have to remain at his level of incompetence. In some instances, because the child was still growing mentally, his intellectual competence would increase during the “repeating” year, and he would then become eligible for further promotion. If not, he would “fail” again, and “repeat” again.

(It is worth noting that this “failure” is the same thing that, in vocational studies, we call “success,” namely, the attainment of final placement at the level of incompetence.)

School officials do not like this system: they think that the accumulation of incompetent students lowers the standard within the school. One administrator told me, “I wish I could pass all the dull pupils and fail the bright ones: that would raise standards and grades would improve. This hoarding of dull students lowers the standard by reducing the average achievement in my school.”

Such an extreme policy will not be generally tolerated. So, to avoid the accumulation of incompetents, administrators have evolved the plan of promoting everyone,
the incompetent as well as the competent.
They find psychological justification for this policy by saying that it spares students the painful experience of failure.

What they are actually doing is
applying percussive sublimation
to the incompetent students.

The result of this wholesale percussive sublimation is that high-school graduation may now represent the same level of scholastic achievement as did Grade 11 a few years ago. In time, graduation will sink in value to the level of the old Grade 10, Grade 9 and so on.

This phenomenon I designate
Hierarchal Regression.

Results of Hierarchal Regression

Educational certificates, diplomas and degrees are losing their value as measures of competence. Under the old system we knew that a pupil who “failed” Grade 8 must at least have been competent in Grade 7. We knew that a pupil who “failed” first-year university must at least have been a competent high-school graduate, and so on.

But now we cannot assume any such thing. The modern certificate proves only that the pupil
was competent to endure a certain number of years’ schooling.

High-school graduation, once a widely accepted certificate of competence, is now only a certificate of incompetence for most responsible, well-paid jobs.

It is noteworthy that hierarchal regression is not entirely a modern phenomenon. Many years ago, literacy was itself regarded as a certificate of competence for most important positions. Then it was found that there was an increasing number of literate fools, so employers began to raise their standards—fifth grade, eighth grade, and so on. Each of these standards began as a certificate of competence; each was finally regarded as a certificate of incompetence.

So it goes at the post-high-school level. Bachelors’ and masters’ degrees have regressed in value. Only the doctorate still carries any notable aura of competence, and its value is rapidly being eroded by the emergence of post-doctoral degrees. How long will it be before the post-doctorate, too, becomes a badge of incompetence for many posts, and the earnest striver will have to plow on through post-post and post-post-post doctorates?

Escalation of educational effort speeds the process of degradation. Many universities, for example, now use the very same pupil-teacher system (older students teaching younger students) which fifty years ago was being condemned in the grade schools!

Escalation of effort in any other field produces comparable results. Under the pressure to get
more
engineers, scientists, priests, teachers, automobiles, apples, spacemen or what have you, and to get them faster, the standards of acceptance necessarily sink: hierarchal regression sets in.

You, as a consumer, an employer, an artisan or teacher, no doubt see the results of hierarchal regression. I shall return to the subject later, to suggest ways in which it might be controlled.

2. Computerized Incompetence

A drunken man is temporarily incompetent to steer a straight course. So long as he is on foot, he is a danger chiefly to himself. But put him at the wheel of an automobile and he may kill a score of other people before he breaks his own neck.

The point needs no laboring. Obviously, the more powerful the means at my disposal, the greater good or harm I can do by my competence or incompetence.

The printing press, radio, television have in turn expanded man’s power to propagate and perpetuate his incompetence. Now comes the computer.

Computer Use File: Case No. 11

R. Fogg, founder and managing director of Fogg Interlocking Blocks, Inc., was an inventor-engineer who had reached his level of incompetence as an administrator. Fogg constantly complained about the poor performance of his office manager, clerks and accountants. He did not realize that they were about as efficient as most similar groups of employees. Some of them were not yet at their levels of incompetence; they turned out some work and kept the business going. They managed to take Fogg’s muddled instructions, separate what had best be ignored from what would be of some use to the company, and then took appropriate action.

A salesman convinced Fogg that a computer could be programmed to do much of the work of his office staff as well as improve efficiency of the plant. Fogg placed the order, the computer was installed, and the “surplus” staff was dismissed.

But Fogg soon found that the work of the firm was not being handled so fast or so well as before. There were two points about a computer that he had not understood. (At least, he had not understood that they would apply to his operations.)

       
a) A computer balks at any unclear instruction, simply blinks its lights and waits for clarification.

       
b) A computer has no tact. It will not flatter. It will not use judgment. It will not say, “Yes, sir; at once, sir!” to wrong instructions, then go away and do the job right. It will simply follow the wrong orders, so long as they are clearly given.

Fogg’s business ran rapidly downhill and within a year his company was bankrupt. He had fallen victim to
Computerized Incompetence.

M
ORE
H
ORRIBLE
E
XAMPLES
The Quebec Department of Education wrongly paid out $275,864 in student loans. The mistake was made by computer-directed multi-copying services.

In New York a bank computer went on the blink; three billion dollars’ worth of accounts went unbalanced for twenty-four hours.

The computer belonging to an airline printed 6,000 instead of ten replenishment notices. The airline found itself with 5,990 surplus orders of mint chocolates.

A study made in 1966 shows that over 70 percent of computer installations made to that time in Britain must be considered commercially unsuccessful.

One computer was so sensitive to static electricity that it made errors every time it was approached by a female employee wearing nylon lingerie.

Three Observations

       
1) The computer may be incompetent in itself—that is, unable to do regularly and accurately the work for which it was designed. This kind of incompetence can never be eliminated, because the Peter Principle applies in the plants where computers are designed and manufactured.

       
2) Even when competent in itself, the computer vastly magnifies the results of incompetence in its owners or operators.

       
3) The computer, like a human employee, is subject to the Peter Principle. If it does good work at first, there is a strong tendency to promote it to more responsible tasks, until it reaches its level of incompetence.

The Signs Interpreted

These two signs—the rapid spread of hierarchal regression and computerized incompetence—are only part of a general trend which, if continued, will escalate inevitably to the Total-Life-Incompetence level. In Chapter 3 you saw that the obsessive concern for
input
could eventually destroy the purpose for which the hierarchy existed (
output
). Here we see that the thoughtless escalation of educational effort and the automation of outmoded or incorrect methods are examples of this mindless kind of input. Our leaders in politics, science, education, industry and the military have insisted that we go as fast as we can and as far as we can inspired only by blind faith that
great input
will produce
great output.

As a student of hierarchiology you now realize that society’s continued escalation of input is simply
Peter’s Inversion
on a grand scale.

Man’s First Mistake: The Wheel

Look at the results. Conceivably we are all doomed by our own cleverness and devotion to escalation. Our land, a few decades ago, was dotted with crystal-clear lakes and laced with streams of cool, clear water. The soil produced wholesome food. Citizens had easy access to rural scenes of calm beauty.

Now lakes and streams are cesspools. Air is noxious with smoke, soot and smog. Land and water are poisoned with pesticides, so that birds, bees, fish, and cattle are dying. The countryside is a dump for garbage and old automobiles.

This is progress! We have made so much progress that we cannot even speak with confidence about the prospect of
human
survival. We have blighted the promise of this century and converted the miracles of science into a chamber of horrors where a nuclear holocaust could become a death-trap for the entire human race. If we continue feverishly planning and inventing and building and rebuilding for more of this progress, we will achieve the level of
Total-Life-Incompetence.

New Social Science Shows the Way

Do you sometimes feel you have a rendezvous with oblivion but would prefer to break the date? Hierarchiology can show you how.

Of all proposals for betterment of the human condition and survival of the human race only one, the Peter Principle, realistically embodies factual knowledge about the human organism. Hierarchiology reveals man’s true nature, his perpetual production of hierarchies, his quest for means of maintaining them, and his countervailing tendency to destroy them. The Peter Principle and hierarchiology provide the unifying factor for all social sciences.