A Class with Drucker - Headway | Work on yourself

162 ■ A CLASS WITH DRUCKER
to the next higher rank. The process is then repeated. According to the
principle, this process of promotion, followed by demonstrated competent
performance, can go on indefinitely, or at least until the employee
reaches a position where he or she is no longer competent. Then the
process stops and the employee remains in the position <strong>with</strong>out external
intervention.
Returning the employee to his previous job at which he performed
well is very difficult if not impossible. However, if some action to remove
someone who had risen to his level of incompetence was not taken, the
company would eventually suffer. The net result, according to Laurence
J. Peter, was that most of the higher levels of any organization gradually
would be filled by people who attained their positions because they were
good at their previous job assignments, but were incompetent in their
current positions. This concept resonated <strong>with</strong> many people who were
delighted to consider their bosses as having risen to positions in which
they were now demonstrating their incompetence.
While the Peter Principle paid some attention to cautioning that an
employee promoted to a new job should be qualified for it, the general
solution was that since the corporation could not demote these incompetents
who had arrived at their final and incompetent level, it had to get
rid of them, or suffer the consequence of inevitable failure due to a preponderance
of incompetents in critical high-level positions. This made
the Peter Principle a possible argument in McQuinn’s defense in wanting
to fire Novak.
Peter <strong>Drucker</strong> strongly disagreed.
Do People Really Rise to Their Levels of Incompetence?
Peter objected to the Peter Principle for several reasons. First, he suggested
that the concept was overly simplistic. He stated that those who worked
more <strong>with</strong> their minds, what Peter called “knowledge workers,” were
becoming more important in the workforce due to developing technology.
Therefore, increasing numbers of managers were likely to be placed into
positions in which they failed to perform in certain situations. Everything
possible should be done to avoid this situation happening.
Peter said, “We have no right to ask people to take on jobs that will
defeat them, no right to break good people. We don’t have enough good
young people to practice human sacrifice.” The selection of the right