In his 2009 discussion paper Competitive Careers as a Way to Mediocracy* Professor of Business Administration, Matthias Kräkel, (presently at the Bonn Graduate School of Economics, Germany), provides a contemporary corollary to the well-known Peter Principle (1969). Which famously states that: “Individuals are promoted until they reach their level of incompetence.” Or, put another way, […]
Tag: Peter Principle
Random-promotion discoveries, now and then
Last month, three Italian researchers were awarded an Ig Nobel prize for demonstrating mathematically that organisations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random. But their research was neither the beginning nor the end of the story of how bureaucracies try – and fail – to find a good promotion method. Alessandro Pluchino, […]
The Nicolaides twist on random promotion
Phedon Nicolaides, professor at the European Institute of Public Administration, Maastricht, The Netherlands, proposes [in an essay in the Cyprus Mail] a twist on the Ig-Nobel-Prize-winning method of promoting people randomly in an organization: In September 2010 three Italian scientists won the infamous Ig Nobel prize in the category of management…. [Their solution, based on […]
Incompetence, considered computationally
Alex Pluccino and colleagues at Universita di Catania, Italy, computed how the Peter Principle probably produces pathetic pathologies in large organizations. Details are in their study: “The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study,” Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda and Cesare Garofalo, arXiv:0907.0455v1, July 2, 2009, and Physica A 389 (2010) 467-472. The authors explain: “In the […]