A Class with Drucker - Headway | Work on yourself

164 ■ A CLASS WITH DRUCKER
young. The movie’s hero, Logan, was a member of this murderous society
who was told he had reached the maximum age limit of thirty. This wasn’t
true, but has nothing to do <strong>with</strong> the point of my telling you the story.
Even this brutal society at least gave the appearance of giving its victims
a fair break. Those reaching the magic age of thirty were forced to
pass through a gauntlet of lethal laser beams. Those avoiding the beams,
and thus surviving an instantaneous death, were allowed to leave the society
<strong>with</strong> their lives. Reportedly, they now lived somewhere else and were
never heard from or seen again. In reality, no one survived the lethal laser
gauntlet, but no one in the youthful society knew this, except those who
ran the system. However, this idea at least left some hope to those when
they reached the age of life termination.
The Peter Principle doesn’t leave even hope. It is ruthless in its dictate
that managers reaching their level of incompetence must be removed for
the good of the corporation.
Implicit in the theory is the assumption that if a manager is incompetent
for one particular job, he or she couldn’t function well in any job at
the same or, of course, a higher level. It assumes that if a manager demonstrates
incompetence and fails in one job, he or she cannot rebound to
become a success in another. Both assumptions are in error and therefore
not only unfair, but incredibly wasteful in human potential, for history is
rife <strong>with</strong> “incompetents” who were later proved to be great successes.
The Peter Principle Disproved
Rowland Hussey Macy was a Nantucket Quaker. He studied business and
then started a retail store. It failed. He started another. It failed, too. This
happened six times, and he failed each time. Were his stores divisions of a
Fortune 500 company practicing the Peter Principle, he would have been
discharged after his first attempt as he would have clearly demonstrated
his incompetence at retailing, business, and entrepreneurship. However,
Macy’s seventh attempt succeeded and he died a wealthy man. A hundred
and fifty years later, Macy’s still exists and earns roughly $30 billion in
annual sales in approximately 800 stores. Not too bad a legacy for someone
who had clearly risen to his level of incompetence six times before his
overwhelming success.
Winston Churchill reached his level of incompetence as First Lord of
the Admiralty during World War I, during which he succeeded in convincing
the British War Cabinet to undertake the biggest Allied disaster of the