Laurence J. Peter (1919–1990)

For those who have searched for a simple explanation of Murphy's law beyond a generalized pessimism, this is your book. It describes how organizations fail by describing how organizational structure serves to magnify the individual failures of the people within it. Simply put, the Peter Principle is thus: each person rises to the level of his/her incompetence in any organization, and then, unable to move up, spends the rest of a career failing to perform and making the rest of us suffer. I show more had heard of this principle before reading this book, but had not realized it to be more than a comedian's punch line. In fact, however, there's a frightening amount of wisdom to be found in this book.

Just ponder for a moment your own place of employ. Think of all the meetings and the futile attempts at correcting mind-numbing insults to productivity and common sense. Now hear Peter's explanation: "In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties...Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence." Generally people make a good-faith effort to perform their jobs well, but the nature of bureaucracy takes its toll eventually. Peter's book explains how the system doesn't work and classifies the various forms of the problem. He helpfully provides ways to manipulate faulty systems and use the Pull of Patrons to rise to your own desired level. He also gives ways to evade succombing to final placement yourself through creative incompetence that masks a genuine productivity and thus avoids unwelcome promotion. By coining numerous deadpan terms, Peter actually communicates genuine organizational problems in a non-threatening way. Whether you are in business, government, education, or any other bureaucratic slog, you can at last see the reason for your frustrations, even if humor alone is often your only solace. There are, of course, some elements of the book that have not been updated. The phonophilia has morphed to gadgetophilia, and tabulatory gigantism to iphone polyappism, but some features such as compulsory alternation, are timeless.

Go read this book, before you are faced with that most sad sign of Final Placement, utter irrelevance. show less

44 years after its publication, The Peter Principle still seems to apply to modern life, which is either a sign of how right Peter and Hull were back then, how little we (as a species) have learned from them, how powerless we really are before The Principle or a morbid mixture of all the above.

All things considered, it's well written, short, concise and useful, which makes it a must-read for every competent human being (and maybe some smart incompetent ones)

Laurence Peter describes the incompetent world, particular that of the common workplace, in very astute and definitive terms. We already know the world is full of idiots who somehow got to an admirable level of success and “achievement,” however Peter breaks down this thought into a polished and elaborate theory/principle. There isn’t much offered in how to change the Peter Principle, which leaves the reader with a bleak outlook of his or her workplace future. Highly pessimistic, this show more book is definitely funny and sadly very true. show less

An entertaining, though dated (sexist, racist, homophobic) business/management guide, presented as humor but in its central premise, that we are promoted to the level of our incompetence, spot on.