Peter or Dilbert? Like Groucho Marx said, “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”

I wonder whether Laurence J. Peter (Peter Principle) and Scott Adams (Dilbert Principle) ever met and ever discussed their visionary ideas about the way organizations work. Given the difference in age between these two, I doubt it, although Peter’s theories clearly made their mark in Scott, who knew how to express them at their best in his famous comic strip starring Dilbert.

In a nutshell, the Peter Principle (1969) says that in a company or organization, the people who do their work well are promoted to positions of increased responsibility, until they attain their level of incompetence.

There’s no doubt that this principle has be proven on many occasions when a top management position has been filled by an “incompetent” professional. Not intrinsically incompetent as he has already undertaken previous projects with surprising efficiency, but incompetent at this very moment in this particular job.

Peter deduced several rules of the thumb from his theory which are very interesting and revealing. The first one states “in time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out his duties”. The second one indicates that “work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence”. So if you do your work well, be glad. You are not an incompetent employee yet, but it will come.

Getting as far as here, we need to examine under a magnifying glass the recruitment and selection processes in organization. Mistaken logic can make you think that if a person does his work well, he will be just as efficient in a new position. That’s a big error that Peter tries to warn us of. Never favour the efficiency of an employee doing his work over the validity of his previous position.

If you don’t heed this piece of advice, you can find yourself without the ideal person for the position and with the wrong and inefficient person in another. There is still a ray of hope though… This principle only holds in very hierarchical organizational structures, so if that is not our case, then we need not worry about the Peter Principle.

Although the Peter Principle has always been attractive to me because of its overwhelming logic, I must say that I have a weakenss for Dilbert, the hero of the satirical nineties comic strip created by  Adams. In my opinion, Scott Adams has brilliantly turned the Peter Principle on its head by stating that “companies tend to systematically promote their least-competent employees to management, in order to limit the amount of damage they’re capable of doing”.

Something happened with the Dilbert Principle that Peter was lucky enough not to have suffered. Academically it was rejected because it contradicted the classical techniques in human resources management, although it was applauded by people in the business world, namely analysts and managers. Just as Guy Kawasaki, of Apple Computer, said “There are only two kinds of companies, those that recognize they’re just like ‘Dilbert’ and those that are also like ‘Dilbert’ but don’t know it yet.”

Both theories are similar and in truth they complement each other. Peter thought that companies use promotions to compensate efficient employees until they attained a position where they were incompetent—and what is worse, remain there. On the contrary, Dilbert believed that the employees who had already shown incompetence were intentionally promoted to avoid wreaking more damage in the company. Evidently both principles can be seen in the same organization. What disquiets me the most is the latter. To think that the real work, the productive work is done by the people in the lower part of the pecking order does not surprise me. But to think that management positions may have very little relevance, at least in the eyes of whoever decides who to promote and who not. Yes, that is cause for considerable concern. It has to be said that neither Peter nor Adams reinvented the wheel. Already back in 1910, José Ortega y Gasset, a well known Spanish philosopher,  said when visiting Argentina that “all public employees should be demoted to the next level down, because they have been promoted until they became incompetent.” That is a perfect synthesis of the two principles together…