The Peter Principle

British born playwright Raymond Hull (1919 – 1986) and Vancouver born hierarchiologist Laurence Peter (1919 – 1990) met in a theatre lobby during an intermission, in the early 1960s. They agreed that they were watching an atrocious production.

Discussing the reasons for this theatrical disaster, Peter told Hull that employees rise to their level of incompetence. Workers keep getting promoted until they stop performing well. Later, the two men collaborated on their 1969 best-seller, The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong, which focused on this key insight. The book was rejected by more than a dozen publishers before being accepted, and becoming a best-seller.

Many TV mockumentaries/ sitcoms throughout the world have been called The Office, including a BBC production 2001-3, followed by an NBC one 2005 – 2013. These series were directly inspired by The Peter Principle, and showed incompetent people in action. The same is true of the comic strip Dilbert, written and illustrated by Scott Adams (1957 – ) since 1989. Adams gained inspiration from his banking career at Crocker National Bank in San Francisco between 1979 and 1986.

The Peter Principle describes organizational dysfunction. Companies frequently have the wrong person in the wrong place. Yet, Peter was uncertain about the incompetent people at the top. In a 1984 television interview on CBC Television with Carole Taylor (1945 – ), he admitted.”I’m never sure whether our world is run by idiots who are sincere or wise guys who are putting us on.”

Taylor was probably an appropriate interviewer. She has had a dubious career. She was Miss Toronto 1964; an independent member of Vancouver City Council from 1986 to 1990; Chair of the Vancouver Board of Trade from 2001 to 2002; Chair of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) from 2001 until 2005; British Columbia’s Minister of Finance from 2005 until 2008; Chancellor of Simon Fraser University (in Burnaby, British Columbia) from 2011 until 2014. From my perspective, her most notable achievement was the introduction of the first carbon tax in North America, introduced in 2008. It was based on Sweden’s carbon tax, that successfully reduced carbon dioxide emissions from transport by 11%.

Most people think The Peter Principle was written as satire. Yet, even satire can contain truths. Researchers have undertaken studies based on Peter and Hull’s treatise, and then written reports about remedial actions that can prevent workers from rising to their level of incompetence.

A 2009 study by Italian researchers offered a radical approach to the Peter Principle problem. It found that companies may be better served by leaving things to chance and promoting people at random.

A 2018 study looked at data from more than 50 000 sales workers at 214 firms and “found evidence consistent with the ‘Peter Principle.'” It found organizations were more likely to promote top sales staff into managerial positions even if the most productive worker wasn’t necessarily the best candidate.

Some organizations counter the Peter Principle through a dual track approach that allows for high performers to advance their careers = get income increases and/or fancy job titles, without necessarily having to climb the corporate ladder.

Some organizations have tried to tackle the Peter Principle problem by focusing less on a worker’s past performance and more on their potential. They use what’s called the nine-box method to evaluate prospective leaders, using a three-by-three grid that weighs an employee’s accomplishments and their future potential. “Women were actually getting slightly higher performance ratings within the nine-box system, but they were getting sharply lower potential ratings. So it seems like potential is something very difficult to forecast, but it’s an area where various biases can sneak in.”

Peter’s career

Peter worked as a teacher in Vancouver between 1941 and 1965, before becoming an education professor at the University of British Columbia. In 1966, Peter moved to California, where he became an Associate Professor of Education, Director of the Evelyn Frieden Centre for Prescriptive Teaching, and Coordinator of Programs for Emotionally Disturbed Children at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Peter also wrote: The Peter Prescription: How to Make Things Go Right (1972), The Peter Plan: A Proposal for Survival (1976), Peter’s Quotations: Ideas for Our Times (1977), and more.

He wrote several books aimed at teachers: Prescriptive Teaching (1965); Competencies for Teaching (1975) in four volumes: 1 = Individual Instruction, 2 = Classroom Instruction, 3 = Theraputic Instruction, 4 = Teacher Education.

His insights into teaching are expressed even on the opening page of The Peter Principle, where he writes that he learned early in his career as an educator that “a fair number of teachers, school principals, and superintendents appeared to be unaware of their professional responsibilities, and incompetent in executing their duties.”

Hull’s Career

Hull was born in Shaftesbury, Dorset, England. He emigrated to Vancouver at the end of World War II, and worked as a waiter, janitor and civil servant. In 1949 he studied creative writing at the University of British Columbia and discovering he had an aptitude for it. After graduation, he eventually began writing television screenplays for the CBC. He later wrote for the stage and, in time, formed The Gastown Players.

His literary output included plays: The Drunkard (1967); Wedded to a Villain (1967); Son of the Drunkard = The Drunkard’s Revenge (1982). Other works were: Profitable Playwriting (1968); How To Get What You Want (1969); Writing for Money in Canada (1969); Effective Public Speaking (1971); Gastown’s Gassy Jack (1971) (co-authored with Olga Ruskin (nee Bruchovsky, 1931 – 2010); How to Write a Play (1983). in addition to co-authoring The Peter Principle (1969), with Laurence Peter.

Hull and Peter’s names lives on

In 2006 Vancouver Public Library installed 26 literary plaques. One of these was outside the Metro Theatre, 1370 S.W. Marine Drive, which was the location where Peter and Hull met. It reads:

“In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”

From The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong

One of the most famous non-fiction books written in British Columbia, The Peter Principle (1969), was co-authored by Raymond Hull and Laurence J. Peter after the pair met as strangers while attending an amateur production at the Metro Theatre. In the lobby, during intermission, Hull mentioned the production was a failure. Laurence J. Peter, an Education professor at UBC, suggested to Hull that people invariably rise to their level of incompetence. In their international bestseller that resulted, The Peter Principle, Peter described his theme as “hierarchiology,” a term now commonly used when analyzing systems in human society. Hull described the content as, “the tragi-comic truth about incompetence, its causes and its cure.” Dr. Laurence J. Peter, who was born in Vancouver and worked for the Vancouver school system from 1941 to 1965, left B.C. and worked in the Education faculty of the University of Southern California. He wrote 11 more books and died in 1990. Raymond Hull was a writer and also an actor and playwright. He died in 1985, bequeathing most of his royalties from six plays and 18 books to the Canadian Authors Association, and most of the rest of his estate, approximately $100,000, was given to the Vancouver Public Library.

[end of inscription on plaque]

Raymond Hull Quotations:

All marriages are happy. It’s the living together afterward that causes all the trouble.

He who trims himself to suit everyone will soon whittle himself away.

The applause of a single human being is of great consequence.

Laurence Peter Quotations:

The noblest of all dogs is the hot dog; it feeds the hand that bites it.

A man doesn’t know what he knows until he knows what he doesn’t know.

Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.

The problem with temptation is that you may not get another chance.

Every girl should use what Mother Nature gave her before Father Time takes it away.

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today.

The reason crime doesn’t pay is that when it does, it is called a more respectable name.

Competence, like truth, beauty, and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.

The purpose of my books is not to proclaim that I know all the answers, or plan to save the world; but by writing these stories, the idea is to turn people on to thinking in terms of solutions, rather than in terms of escalating problems.

Peter was fond of quoting the wisdom of American humourist James Boren (1925 – 2010): When in charge, ponder. When in trouble, delegate. And when in doubt, mumble. Boren founded the International Association of Professional Bureaucrats and, in 1992, was the official candidate for President of the United States, for the Apathy Party of America, with his campaign slogan: I have what it takes to take what you’ve got. He lost to Bill Clinton.

Homogenized Milk

Sometimes Peter explains basic concepts using analogies: “the cream that rises to the top turns sour.” If this is still too difficult, he paraphrases it: ‘The cream rises until it sours.’ Unfortunately, many of the people he was trying to explain this to, have probably drunk homogenized milk all of their lives, and have no understanding of how milk and cream start off as separate fractions.

Peter probably had no difficulty explaining his concepts to members his own generation, people who had grown up with standard milk who intuitively knew that cream is lighter than milk. In dealing with younger people there are experiential gaps, often called generation gaps. Bridging these gaps can be difficult.

Auguste Gaulin (1857 – 1922) invented an emulsifying machine, he called a homogenizer. Its three piston pump forced milk through a narrow tube under pressure. This action broke fat globules into smaller sizes to prevent separation and rising. The machine was patented in 1899, but homogenization did not become popular with the general public until the 1920s, when large quantities of homogenized milk were purchased and people began to notice the quality difference.

In North America, the use of homogenized milk began at The Torrington Creamery, Torrington, Connecticut in 1919, but did not spread. By 1927, The Laurentian Dairy, in Ottawa Ontario, started to produce homogenized milk. By 1932, milk plants in many Ontario cities and towns offered homogenized milk for sale. In the United States, enthusiasm for the product was generated by William McDonald, Flint, Michigan, in 1932, who introduced homogenized milk there. Through unique experiments and demonstrations involving regurgitation studies, attention of the public was drawn to homogenized milk. Sales by the McDonald Dairy Company, in the midst of the economic depression, stimulated much interest throughout the United States.