Politics and business.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

In what is perhaps a well-known joke that isn't really a joke, a psychologist came up with the Peter Principle: everyone is promoted until they reach their level of incompetence, and soon enough an entire organization is running terribly and inefficiently. We, of course, don't like to take this idea too seriously, even though some mathematical and statistical studies have been developed to test the idea.

The idea? The idea is that random promotions prevent a lot of bad things and bad leaders. This is, politically speaking, an old idea, with some ancient Greek city-states using rotating representative schemes, where people were picked and placed in charge (somewhat).

This isn't too surprising, really. We all know that our boss is a moron and that the criteria for being promoted is as arbitrary as any random scheme. After all, do we really think there is any real science behind advancement? Or are the vagaries of personal politics and business too prevalent for climbing-the-ladder to be anything other than a game of right-place/right-time? Think about it. We all know people who have been passed over or ignored who would be awesome.

Why don't they get promoted? Because they don't look right, don't act right, or don't say the right things. Society seems to complicated now to randomly select or rotate people into and out of Congress. But imagine how different things might be!

Comments

[devil-ad-vocate.livejournal.com]

I worked for two family-owned corporations. In both instances, the 'Pop' spent twenty years building a business that ran smoothly - only to turn it over to a moron son who thought he was a business genius. In both cases, the sons drove the company into bankruptcy.

[mikeyxw.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a solution to the Peter Principle.