Byter Richard from Florida took me to
task by email in respect of a comment made in yesterday's Pareto Principle
post.
In that post I had written that:
· Dr
Peter’s Principle holds that “In a hierarchy,
employees rise to their level of incompetence”; and
· Dr Peter’s Second
Principle is that “Work on a task expands to fit the time allowed for the
task”.
Richard writes:
"I do believe that what you called Dr. Peter's
Second Principle was truly Parkinson's Law -- C. Northcote Parkinson. And he
did have more than one law.”
Whilst I usually check my facts, I wrote
the above using memory as to the authors of the various principles quoted in
the post.
Following are some comments and
corrections.
Dr Laurence J Peter is the author of the
principle that in a hierarchy, employees rise to their level of
incompetence.
Dr Laurence J Peter
This was covered in an earlier Bytes:
The principle was originally advanced as
a humorous treatise by Dr Peter and Raymond Hull in 1969 but subsequently came
to be applied by others as a realistic and useful office guide and principle.
Dr Peter also advanced corollaries:
· Because
in time every post is occupied by employees who have reached their level of
incompetence and who are therefore incompetent to carry out their duties, "work is accomplished by those
employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence."
· Furthermore,
according to Dr Peter, competent managers will promote competent employees;
incompetent managers will feel intimidated by such employees and will dismiss
them, set them up for failure or cause them to remain where they are.
The Peter Principle has been contradicted and refuted by various persons:
·
Cartoonist
Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip, has propounded the Dilbert Principle
which holds that organisations systematically promote their least competent
employees to management, particularly middle-management, to limit the potential
damage they are capable of causing.
Scott Adams
Although his
principle is satirical, as are the refutations, nonetheless the principle and the later criticisms do have factual roots and applications in reality.
According to
Adams:
“I wrote The
Dilbert Principle around the concept that in many cases the least competent,
least smart people are promoted, simply because they’re the ones you don’t want
doing actual work. You want them ordering the doughnuts and yelling at people
for not doing their assignments—you know, the easy work. Your heart surgeons
and your computer programmers—your smart people—aren’t in management. That
principle was literally happening everywhere.”
·
Satirist
Dolson D Dolson also disputes the Peter Principle but for a different
reason. He argues that that the Peter
Principle is faulty in that it is based on the premise that as one rises in an
organisation, the greater the level of competence and skill required.
The reality,
according to Dolson, is that:
o
the higher the management level, the easier the
job;
o
people in the lower and middle levels need to
know what they are doing but people in higher levels and management positions can
achieve their positions by luck and/or political connections;
o
persons
in the higher positions need little actual ability or knowledge to perform
their jobs and can, in fact, rely on the skills of those below them;
o
those
persons can also be demoted, hence attaining their level of incompetence by
demotion, it is not necessarily true that they are promoted to that level and
remain there.
The author of the law that work expands so as to fill the time
available for its completion is, as Byter Richard rightly wrote, C Northcote Parkinson.
Also, as
Richard noted, he has propounded other laws and principles, one such law having been the
subject of a past Bytes, the Law of Triviality, aka the Bicycle Shed Example:
“Organisations give disproportionate weight to trivial
issues.”
with the corollary that:
“The time spent on any item of the agenda will be
in inverse proportion to the sum involved.”
It
can be read at:
Herewith is a collection of C Northcote Parkinson’s laws, including the
above:
Work expands to fill the
time available for its completion; the thing to be done swells in perceived
importance and complexity in a direct ratio with the time to be spent in its
completion.
Expenditures rise to meet
income.
Expansion means complexity;
and complexity decay.
The number of people in any
working group tends to increase regardless of the amount of work to be done.
If there is a way to delay
an important decision the good bureaucracy, public or private, will find it.
The progress of science is
inversely proportional to the number of journals published.
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