There’s nothing paradoxical about Peter’s Principle. It is the consequence of how we think about business.
Our way of thinking about business determines what kind of person is best qualified to lead a business.
When this kind of person is identified as a leader, he is put in the position to award promotions and to determine the principles by which promotions are awarded.
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What if what is required to lead a business is essentially knowing how to make an organization flourish by putting the right people in the right places?
A leader who allows (or causes) Peter’s Principle to undermine his organization is the embodiment of Peter’s Principle.
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Peter’s Principle manifests first at the very top (or at least requires an overpromoted incompetent at the top if it is to remain untreated), but its root cause is cultural.
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In the United States business was not made for humanity, but, rather, humanity for business.
A man who knows how to put humanity in service of business — or as they prefer to say it “utilize human resources to maximize growth and profits” — is, in our eyes, the ideal business leader.
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In the United States, nobody says that the purpose of the individual citizen is to serve the collective. *
In the United States, everyone says that the purpose of the individual employee is to serve the business. **
If we ever put a classic C-level executive in the White House it will be the end of the end of the United States.
Sure as shit, we will eventually put a classic C-level executive in the White House.
We are more loyal to the ideal of the C-level executive than we are to the principles of the Constitution. We don’t actually want the reality of freedom. We want freedom as a national symbol. It could just as easily be “strength” or “unity” or “righteousness.”
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NOTES:
(* …Except in the case of an emergency, of course. If some distant petty tyrant is saying hostile things about our nation to his citizens and entertains fantasies of one day harming the United States, the luxury of individual rights should be temporarily suspended until the threat is neutralized.)
(** What is collectivist, authoritarian American patriot to do? In order to be a true American patriot and really hold to our collective ideals he must paradoxically reject all his deepest patriotic drives, and renounce his deepest collectivist desires. He is forced to embrace emergencies — conditions in which he must suspend American values and behave in a radically anti-American manner for the sake of the protection of America and its ideals. And, of course, to support the maximum expansion of business into the lives of every American, which is tantamount to the expansion of collectivism and unbridled authority into the details of each person’s life. But, since this collectivism and near-totalitarian authority comes from the private sphere and not from government, our freedom is understood to be intact, despite the fact that 90% of our waking activities are completely involuntary, and if we are honest with ourselves we completely lack the spiritual and material resources to escape this condition. And this is absolutely acceptable by most people’s intellectual criteria — and also their bodies and spirits, after being administered a gram of soma.)