Sunfish
30th Sep 2011, 18:47
While the authors of this Academic paper will receive an igNobel for their work, it is an eyeopener.
I had forgotten The Peter Principle that all people will eventually be promoted to a level where they are incompetent.
Peter Principle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle)
The Authors of this paper go one step further and prove mathematically that randomly promoting people from anywhere in the organisation will produce a more efficient company.
The hiring of external candidates for management could be explained by the incompetence of the existing Qantas management (ie: Anyone who is dumb enough to work here is obviously not good enough to be a manager).
Do we have an explanation for the train wreck that is Qantas here?
In the late sixties the Canadian psychologist Laurence J. Peter advanced an apparently paradoxical principle, named since then after him, which can be summarized as follows: {\it 'Every new member in a hierarchical organization climbs the hierarchy until he/she reaches his/her level of maximum incompetence'}. Despite its apparent unreasonableness, such a principle would realistically act in any organization where the mechanism of promotion rewards the best members and where the mechanism at their new level in the hierarchical structure does not depend on the competence they had at the previous level, usually because the tasks of the levels are very different to each other. Here we show, by means of agent based simulations, that if the latter two features actually hold in a given model of an organization with a hierarchical structure, then not only is the Peter principle unavoidable, but also it yields in turn a significant reduction of the global efficiency of the organization. Within a game theory-like approach, we explore different promotion strategies and we find, counterintuitively, that in order to avoid such an effect the best ways for improving the efficiency of a given organization are either to promote each time an agent at random or to promote randomly the best and the worst members in terms of competence.
[0907.0455] The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study (http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.0455)
I had forgotten The Peter Principle that all people will eventually be promoted to a level where they are incompetent.
Peter Principle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle)
The Authors of this paper go one step further and prove mathematically that randomly promoting people from anywhere in the organisation will produce a more efficient company.
The hiring of external candidates for management could be explained by the incompetence of the existing Qantas management (ie: Anyone who is dumb enough to work here is obviously not good enough to be a manager).
Do we have an explanation for the train wreck that is Qantas here?
In the late sixties the Canadian psychologist Laurence J. Peter advanced an apparently paradoxical principle, named since then after him, which can be summarized as follows: {\it 'Every new member in a hierarchical organization climbs the hierarchy until he/she reaches his/her level of maximum incompetence'}. Despite its apparent unreasonableness, such a principle would realistically act in any organization where the mechanism of promotion rewards the best members and where the mechanism at their new level in the hierarchical structure does not depend on the competence they had at the previous level, usually because the tasks of the levels are very different to each other. Here we show, by means of agent based simulations, that if the latter two features actually hold in a given model of an organization with a hierarchical structure, then not only is the Peter principle unavoidable, but also it yields in turn a significant reduction of the global efficiency of the organization. Within a game theory-like approach, we explore different promotion strategies and we find, counterintuitively, that in order to avoid such an effect the best ways for improving the efficiency of a given organization are either to promote each time an agent at random or to promote randomly the best and the worst members in terms of competence.
[0907.0455] The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study (http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.0455)