Laurence J. Peter

Laurence J. Peter (September 16, 1919 - January 12, 1990) was a Canadian educator and author. He is best known to the general public for the formulation of the "Peter Principle."

Life

Laurence Johston Peter was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada on September 16, 1919. He received his bachelor's (1957) and master's (1958) degrees in education from Western Washington State College. He then obtained a Doctor of Education degree from Washington State University in 1963.

He taught in Vancouver schools and joined the faculty of the University of British Columbia. Peter married and he and his wife, Irene, had four children: two sons, John and Edward, and two daughters, Margaret and Alice.

Peter moved to California, where he became an Associate Professor of Education, Director of the Evelyn Frieden Centre for Prescriptive Teaching, and Coordinator of Programs for Emotionally Disturbed Children at the University of Southern California.

He became widely famous in 1968 after the publication of The Peter Principle. The manuscript had been rejected by thirty publishers, including McGraw-Hill which had previously published his texts on education. In the rejection slip from McGraw-Hill the editor wrote, "I can foresee no commercial possibilities for such a book and consequently can offer no encouragement" (Barron 1990).

Finally, William Morrow and Company accepted the manuscript. Not expecting it to be successful, they printed only 10,000 copies. It sold more than 200,000 copies in the first year and was on the New York Times best-seller list, and was translated into 38 languages (Barron 1990). Following this success, Peter retired from academic life, authoring several other popular books.

From 1985 to his death in 1990, Peter attended and was involved in management of the Kinetic Sculpture Race in Humboldt County, California. He proposed an award for the race, titled "The Golden Dinosaur Award" which has been handed out every year since to the first sculptural machine to utterly break down immediately after the start.

Peter died on January 12, 1990 at his home in Palos Verdes, California.

Work

Laurence Peter began his career as an educator, teaching both within the school system and a a professor of education at the college level. He was very involved in special education, and published several texts in the field. He is best known, however, for his authorship of the "Peter Principle" published in a humorous book co-authored with Raymond Hull. He also "inadvertently founded" the "salutary science of Hierarchiology" in the same work. While written in a humorous style, Peter's observations have been found to have validity.

The Peter Principle

The "Peter Principle" was stated in the 1968 publication of the same name as follows:

In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence.

This principle holds that in a hierarchical organization members are promoted so long as they work competently. Sooner or later they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their "level of incompetence"), and there they remain. Peter's Corollary states that "in time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out his duties" and adds that "work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence" (Peter and Hull 1969).

Peter noted that although competence would appear to be a vital asset in performing tasks, promotion to higher levels of responsibility depends almost entirely on competence at tasks that the person has already accomplished not on their competence at the new level of responsibility. With his clever wit, Peter was able to satirize both hierarchical organizations and those who wished to succeed in them: "Equal opportunity means everyone will have a fair chance at being incompetent" (Peter 1984). He also highlighted a number of problems and obsessions that befall those who seek promotion to the highest levels, including "Tabulatory Gigantism," the obsession with having a bigger desk than one's colleagues.

Peter's description of management, "the cream rises until it sours," was based on his observations of incompetence in a wide variety of organizations including businesses, school systems, churches, and government agencies. In fact, he noted that bureaucracies of all sorts were inevitably made up of those inadequate to deal with their responsibilities. Continuing his sarcastic insights, Peter noted that "Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status" (Peter 1977, 83).

Hierarchiology

Along with the Peter Principle, Dr. Peter also coined "hierarchiology" as the social science concerned with the basic principles of hierarchically organized systems in human society.

Having formulated the Principle, I discovered that I had inadvertently founded a new science, hierarchiology, the study of hierarchies. The term hierarchy was originally used to describe the system of church government by priests graded into ranks. The contemporary meaning includes any organization whose members or employees are arranged in order of rank, grade or class. Hierarchiology, although a relatively recent discipline, appears to have great applicability to the fields of public and private administration (Peter and Hull 1969).

Peter pointed out that a social class, or caste (social stratification) system is more efficient at avoiding incompetence. Lower-level competent workers will not be promoted above their level of competence as the higher jobs are reserved for members of a higher class.

The prospect of starting near the top of the pyramid will attract to the hierarchy a group of brilliant [higher class] employees who would never have come there at all if they had been forced to start at the bottom (Peter and Hull 1969)

Thus, he reasoned, the hierarchies "are more efficient than those of a classless or equalitarian society."

Legacy

Although humorous, Peter's book contains many real-world examples and thought-provoking explanations of human behavior. Similar observations on incompetence can be found in the Dilbert cartoon series (such as "The Dilbert Principle"), the movie Office Space, and the television show The Office.

In an organizational structure, the Peter Principle's practical application allows assessment of the potential of an employee for a promotion based on performance in the current job, in other words, members of a hierarchical organization eventually are promoted to their highest level of competence, after which further promotion raises them to incompetence. That level is the employee's "level of incompetence" where the employee has no chance of further promotion, thus reaching his or her career's ceiling in an organization.

The employee's incompetence is not necessarily exposed as a result of the higher-ranking position being more difficult—simply, that job is different from the job in which the employee previously excelled, and thus requires different work skills, which the employee usually does not possess. For example, a factory worker's excellence in his job can earn him promotion to manager, at which point the skills that earned him his promotion no longer apply to his job.

One way that organizations attempt to avoid this effect is to refrain from promoting a worker until he or she shows the skills and work habits needed to succeed to the next higher job. Thus, a worker is not promoted to managing others if he or she does not already display management abilities. The corollary is that employees who are dedicated to their current jobs will not be promoted for their efforts, but might, instead, receive a pay increase.

In a similar vein, some real-life organizations recognize that technical people may be very valuable for their skills, but poor managers, and so provide parallel career paths allowing a good technical person to acquire pay and status reserved for management in most organizations.

One complication is that competent employees sometimes pretend to be incompetent. The simplest reasons for this might be avoiding the jealousy of co-workers and to annoy managers. A more complex reason might be avoiding promotion to management, i.e. "Creative Incompetence," which is especially common in businesses such as big box retail store chains where managers' base pay is low and they are not entitled to overtime pay.

It may often happen for cultural reasons, such as a strong identification with the working class leading someone to remain in a working-class job rather than "selling out" or the disdain highly-skilled workers have for management decisions, leading them to avoid management jobs. Companies practicing performance improvement find that employees will deliberately "leave room for improvement" by starting at less than peak effectiveness and reach full productivity later. Employees also deliberately underperform in order to keep quotas and expectations from being set too high.

A second complication is entry-level jobs that are detail oriented and restrictive, thereby favouring detail-oriented workers, yet hinder creative and innovative workers. By definition and necessity, entry-level jobs are the assembly line of an organization, and thus the most creative and innovative employees start in positions of incompetence. The detail-oriented persons are thus promoted over the creative employees. Often these creative employees are incapable of showing their work strengths because of the structured and restrictive assembly line environments, and then are tagged as bad employees.

In reality, creative employees may be more suited to management jobs, but because they are unable to use their strengths in the low-level jobs they hold, they never rise to management, and the innate flexibility and innovation needed for managing is lost to the company. The end result for an organization as a whole is that it will collapse when the incompetents in the ranks outnumber the competent because the organization is no longer able to produce results favorable to its continual existence.

Major publications

• 1965. Prescriptive Teaching. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0070495753
• [1968] 2001. (with Raymond Hull). The Peter Principle. Amereon Ltd. ISBN 978-0848821562
• [1972] 1984. The Peter Prescription: How to Make Things Go Right. Bantam Books. ISBN 978-0553242812
• 1975. Competencies for Teaching (4 volumes). Wadsworth Publishing Company. Volume 1: His Competencies for Teaching ISBN 978-0534003869 Volume 3: Therapeutic Instruction ISBN 978-0534003883
• 1977. Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Times. William Morrow & Company. ISBN 978-0688032173
• 1979. Peter's People and their Marvelous Ideas. William Morrow & Company. ISBN 978-0688034887
• 1981. The Peter Plan. Bantam Books. ISBN 978-0553202519
• 1982. Peter's Almanac. William Morrow & Company. ISBN 978-0688016128
• 1984. Why Things Go Wrong or the Peter Principle Revisited. William Morrow & Co. ISBN 978-0688039028
• 1986. The Peter Pyramid: Or, Will We Ever Get the Point? William Morrow & Company. ISBN 0044400578
• 1987. The Laughter Prescription. Ballantine Books. ISBN 978-0345353337

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Barron, James. 1990. Laurence J. Peter Is Dead at 70; His 'Principle' Satirized Business New York Times, January 15, 1990. Retrieved June 10, 2008.
• Peter, Laurence J. and Raymond Hull. 1969. The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong. New York, NY: William Morrow & Company, Inc.
• E. Lazear. 2000. The Peter Principle: Promotions and Declining Productivity Hoover Institution and Graduate School of Business, Stanford University.
• Gale Reference Team. 2007. "Biography - Peter, Laurence J(ohnston) (1919-1990)" in Contemporary Authors. Thomson Gale.

External links

• A Glossary of Incompetence Time Magazine, Friday, Mar. 28, 1969. Retrieved May 21, 2008.
• The Nartreb Principle Retrieved May 21, 2008.

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