As I wrote yesterday, it was A Big Day for Incompetence as two things came out about the 40th Anniversary Edition of The Peter Principle. Yesterday, I talked about the INC interview with Leigh Buchanan. Today, I will focus on the Foreword, which I wrote for the book. The book is actually not officially out, but BusinessWeek has published the entire Foreword online. You can get it here. To give you taste, here is the opening of my take on "Dr. Peter's Useful and Hilarious Classic."
The Peter Principle came as a revelation to my father,
Lewis Sutton. He ran a little company in San Francisco called Oceanic
Marine that sold furniture and related equipment, which he installed on
United States Navy ships. His livelihood depended on U.S. government
bureaucrats and shipyard managers, who often made him miserable. I grew
up listening to his tirades about how these "overpaid idiots" insisted
that he produce and procure poorly designed furnishings, how they could
barely do their jobs, and how pathetically lazy they were. To make
matters worse, senior government officials produced an onslaught of
absurd procedures that required him to jump through an ever-expanding
maze of administrative hoops—which wasted his time, drove up his costs,
and made him crazy. He concluded: "The morons at the top must be paid
to waste as much taxpayer money as possible."
My father loved The Peter Principle because it
explained why life could be so maddening—and why everyone around you
seems, or is doomed to become, incompetent. The people who ran the U.S.
Navy and the shipyards didn't intend to do such lousy work. They were
simply victims of Dr. Peter's immutable principle. They had been
promoted inevitably, maddeningly, absurdly to their "level of
incompetence." Dr. Peter also taught my father not to expect the few
competent bureaucrats and managers he encountered to stick around for
long, as they would soon be promoted to a job that they were unable to
perform properly. Dr. Peter even showed that such incompetence had
pervaded my dad's business for hundreds of years. The book quotes a
report from 1684 about the British Navy: "The naval administration was
a prodigy of wastefulness, corruption, ignorance, and indolence…no
estimate could be trusted…no contract was performed…no check was
enforced."
My dad took special delight in the pseudoscientific jargon that Dr.
Peter invented to describe the weird and wasteful behaviors displayed
by those languishing at their level of incompetence. Peter gave absurd
and comedic names to the tragic realities of working life. The root of
the entire book, the condition of incompetence that Peter called "Final
Placement Syndrome," leads some to develop "Abnormal Tabulology" (an
"unusual and highly significant arrangement of his desk"). This
pathology is manifested, for example, in "Tabulatory Gigantism" (an
obsession with having a bigger desk than his colleagues) ……. (see the rest here)
P.S. Here is a story about 28,000 UC San Diego students who accidentally got congratulatory emails and letters indicating they had been admitted — when they were actually rejected. The Peter Principle lives!
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