A New Look at The Peter Principle

BusinessWeek's exclusive sneak peek at Bob Sutton's new foreword to Dr. Peter's useful, hilarious classic

By Bob Sutton

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The Peter Principle came as a revelation to my father, Lewis Sutton. He ran a little company in San Francisco called Oceanic Marine that sold furniture and related equipment, which he installed on United States Navy ships. His livelihood depended on U.S. government bureaucrats and shipyard managers, who often made him miserable. I grew up listening to his tirades about how these "overpaid idiots" insisted that he produce and procure poorly designed furnishings, how they could barely do their jobs, and how pathetically lazy they were. To make matters worse, senior government officials produced an onslaught of absurd procedures that required him to jump through an ever-expanding maze of administrative hoops—which wasted his time, drove up his costs, and made him crazy. He concluded: "The morons at the top must be paid to waste as much taxpayer money as possible."

My father loved The Peter Principle because it explained why life could be so maddening—and why everyone around you seems, or is doomed to become, incompetent. The people who ran the U.S. Navy and the shipyards didn't intend to do such lousy work. They were simply victims of Dr. Peter's immutable principle. They had been promoted inevitably, maddeningly, absurdly to their "level of incompetence." Dr. Peter also taught my father not to expect the few competent bureaucrats and managers he encountered to stick around for long, as they would soon be promoted to a job that they were unable to perform properly. Dr. Peter even showed that such incompetence had pervaded my dad's business for hundreds of years. The book quotes a report from 1684 about the British Navy: "The naval administration was a prodigy of wastefulness, corruption, ignorance, and indolence…no estimate could be trusted…no contract was performed…no check was enforced."

My dad took special delight in the pseudoscientific jargon that Dr. Peter invented to describe the weird and wasteful behaviors displayed by those languishing at their level of incompetence. Peter gave absurd and comedic names to the tragic realities of working life. The root of the entire book, the condition of incompetence that Peter called "Final Placement Syndrome," leads some to develop "Abnormal Tabulology" (an "unusual and highly significant arrangement of his desk"). This pathology is manifested, for example, in "Tabulatory Gigantism" (an obsession with having a bigger desk than his colleagues).

My father's business was especially afflicted with the "Teeter-Totter Syndrome" ("a complete inability to make decisions") and "Cachinatory Inertia" ("the habit of telling jokes instead of getting on with business"). As with so many others who were buoyed by this international bestseller, Dr. Peter's sense of the absurd helped my father combat this tragedy of ineptitude by responding with laughter rather than rage.

I have a soft spot for The Peter Principle because my dad loved it so much. Before revisiting it to write this forward, I hadn't read it since it was first published in 1969 (when I was fifteen). I expected it would be a quaint curiosity, that Dr. Peter's old book would be largely irrelevant to today's workplace. I presumed that the application of business knowledge developed over the last forty years would have stamped out many maladies described by Dr. Peter, that market forces would have eliminated many or most organizations that were riddled with incompetence, and that subsequent writings on the subject would be more useful and engaging than The Peter Principle. I was wrong on all three counts.

Yes, the book is archaic in some ways, especially in its use of sexist language and examples. Yet the book's main ideas remain as pertinent to running and working in an organization today as they were forty years ago. None of this would have surprised Dr. Peter, who depicted his ideas as timeless and immutable facts of organizational life.

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