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Friday, December 18, 2009

Why your boss is incompetent

Brilliant article from Why your boss is incompetent - life - 17 December 2009 - New Scientist. The Peter Principle which in my experience is just soooo true and here is an explanation of why it works:

"Jobs generally get more difficult the higher up any ladder you climb, most people only come equipped with a more or less fixed level of talent that corresponds to their intelligence, knowledge and energy. At some point, then, they will be promoted into a job they can't quite handle. They will, as Peter and Hull put it, 'reach the level of their own incompetence'. And there they will stay, fouling up operations until they either retire or some egregiously inept act gets them fired.

"The problem is what they get up to in the meantime. "They end up distracting us from their crummy work with giant desks," says Robert Sutton of the Stanford Graduate School of Business in California. "They replace action with incomprehensible acronyms, blame others for failure, and cheat to create the illusion of progress." Meanwhile, Peter and Hull concluded, the actual work gets done by those who have not yet scaled the summit of their own incompetence. That would be you and me, then."

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