The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong
By Laurence J. Peter, Raymond Hull
This book, widely popular around the world in the 1960s, has run into several editions. It deals with the principles of hierarchy (hierarchology) providing engaging reading with thought and humour that would help individuals who aspire to effective leadership or service anywhere.
Why do things go wrong? Dr. Peter notices that one reason so many employees are incompetent is that the skills required to get a job often have nothing to do with what is required to do the job itself. The skills required to run a great political campaign have little to do with the skills required to govern. Laurence J Peter gave his name to the principle: “In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” The corollary is that: “In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties.”
He demonstrates this with examples from his own experience. As an educator, he observed how a competent teacher who because of her excellence as teacher got promoted to principalship proved to be a failure in the new office. Why did the brilliant teacher fail? Her new job required her to manage teachers. She applied the same principles with which she dealt with students in the classroom, earning the colleagues’ dislike. A brilliant mechanic when promoted to foreman lacked the skills necessary for the new office and turned out to be an utter failure, unpopular and unhappy. These two capable people have reached the thresholds of their ‘incompetence”. There are three types of employees—a majority who are “moderately competent’ and a minority divided into competent and incompetent. There are automatic promotions in hierarchies where incompetent ones get promoted (e.g., government organizations). Competence can be mistaken for complete loyalty to rule and the conventions of the organization. For example, a nurse who wakes up a sleeping patient at the exact specified time to deliver sleeping pills! The hyper competent people who achieve more than what is expected may earn the dislike of everyone for inappropriate behaviour or disregard for rules, and thus fail. The book in the end has solutions to offer to those who wish to lead fulfilling careers and jobs.
The Courage to be Disliked
By Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi
Written in the form of four dialogues between a young man and his teacher, the book uses the psychological ideas of the 19th century Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler to demonstrate that human happiness is in the hands of each individual and is independent of one’s past experiences, however bad they are. It is not our past that determines our future. Those who are tied to past traumas can never earn happiness. If we focus on all the wrong things that we find in ourselves, we will find innumerable reasons for self-hatred. Most of what we think of as competition is just imaginary and hurts our happiness. Adler refuted the ideas of Sigmund Freud that insisted on childhood trauma as determining our adult behaviour. While he agrees that our attitudes are influenced by early experiences, he insists on the fact that we can change ourselves at any given point in time. Old mental blocks can be overcome .Yet another insight it gives is that our self hatred is shutting out others and is not actually warranted. People cultivate their sense of inadequacy or inferiority. Awareness of one’s own flaws is of two kinds: objective and subjective. The objective ones – such as wealth or appearance – can be measured, whereas the subjective ones are fabricated by the individual to make himself feel inferior and unhappy thereby. The young man in the book approached him with imagined reasons to isolate himself from others and avoid getting hurt – a form of escapism. The book teaches us that unhappiness is something that is chosen by the person. When we feel unhappy we wish our circumstances to change, thereby denying our choice to be happy .Thus we use circumstances to serve as justification for our chosen unhappiness. Competition makes us unhappy. This is a mindset created by society around us. We should learn to think of others as comrades, not competitors. It does not matter if one is trying to walk in front of others or walk behind. Our life is not about competition. It is about progressing from our current state to a better one. Courage is the secret of happiness.
Prof Gigy Joseph
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