Posted by
Garnet92 on Thursday, January 22, 2009 12:54:28 PM
In 1968, before some of you were born, Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull wrote a book called, The Peter Principle. The premise was (and still is) that in an organizational structure, an employee is considered for a promotion based on performance in their current job.
Did I miss something? Did we just elect Barack Hussein Obama to the office of President of the United States based on his performance as U.S. Senator? I don’t think so. He was already waaay past his level of incompetence. He was elected primarily because he is black and that fact cannot be refuted.
This means that members of a hierarchical organization eventually are promoted to their highest level of competence, after which further promotion raises them to incompetence. That level is the employee's "level of incompetence" where the employee has no chance of further promotion, thus reaching his or her career's ceiling in an organization.
Obama’s last level of partial competence was community organizer – and even that is debatable. Take Emil Jones (his benefactor and President of the Illinois Senate) out of the picture and Barack’s tenure in the Illinois Senate would have been average, at best. We have promoted Obama to the TOP of the country’s hierarchy, skipping several levels, any of which would have exposed his lack of qualifications for the next level.
The employee's incompetence is not necessarily exposed as a result of the higher-ranking position being more difficult — simply, that job is different from the job in which the employee previously excelled, and thus requires different work skills, which the employee usually does not possess. For example, a factory worker's excellence in his job can earn him promotion to manager, at which point the skills that earned him his promotion no longer apply to his job.
At which job had Obama previously excelled? Seriously, I’d really like to know.
Where exceptions to this exist, the scenario switches to the "Septic Tank Principle" which is broadly similar but is usually described as "excrement rising to the top".
Need I say more?