Laurence J. Peter Quotes

In every organization there is a considerable accumulation of dead wood in the executive level.

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

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.

IT SHOULD BE clear by now that when an employee reaches his level of incompetence, he can no longer do any useful work. Incompetent, Yes! Idle, No! This in no way suggests that the ultimate promotion suddenly changes the former worker into an idler. Not at all! In most cases he still wants to work; he still makes a great show of activity; he sometimes thinks he is working. Yet actually little that is useful is accomplished

an employee’s relationship — by blood, marriage or acquaintance — with a person above him in the hierarchy.

super-incumbent,” who is “a person above you who, having reached his level of incompetence, blocks your path to promotion”).

If man is going to rescue himself from a future intolerable existence, he must first see where his unmindful escalation is leading him. He must examine his objectives and see that true progress is achieved through moving forward to a better way of life, rather than upward to total life incompetence

Wellington, examining the roster of officers assigned to him for the 1810 campaign in Portugal, said, “I only hope that when the enemy reads the list of their names, he trembles as I do.

La competencia de un empleado no es determinada por los extraños, sino por su superior en la jerarquía.

In time I saw that all such cases had a common feature. The employee had been promoted from a position of competence to a position of incompetence. I saw that, sooner or later, this could happen to every employee in every hierarchy.

Man’s First Mistake: The Wheel

the ability to charm, to amuse, to inflame a crowd of ten thousand voters with voice and gesture did not necessarily carry with it the ability to think sensibly, to debate soberly and to vote wisely on the nation’s business.

tis the curse of service,
Preferment goes by letter and affection,
And not by old gradation, where each second Stood heir to the first.

A political party now exists primarily as an apparatus for selecting candidates and getting them elected to office.

In most hierarchies, super-competence is more objectionable than incompetence.