Peter Principle saves Japan

[imomus]

I'm fascinated by ideas, and how they change the lives of the people who come up with them. It seems to be an interest that runs in the family; my mother once had a flirtatious correspondence with Cyril Parkinson, a man made famous by the simple observation that work expands to fill the time allocated for its completion.



The other day I came across another such idea, one I hadn't heard before. It's called The Peter Principle, was first described by Dr Laurence Peter in 1969, and states that in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. Basically, the principle states that people get rewarded for things they can do well by being promoted to the point at which they're doing something they can't do well. At that point the promotion stops, and there they stay.

There are some corollaries:

1. In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out his duties.
2. Work is carried out by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.
3. Anything that works will be used in progressively more challenging applications until it fails.



This has mind-boggling ramifications; it could account for a world in which everyone is basically incompetent, because they've all been promoted to "the position of first failure", and left there to keep failing.

As often happens when you encounter a new idea like this, I immediately started applying the Peter Principle to real world situations. I happened to watch a documentary called Kublai Khan's Lost Fleet, which examines how a Mongol navy with superior weaponry and 4500 ships was destroyed while attempting to invade Japan in August 1281, with the loss of 130,500 Mongol soldiers and sailors.



Now, the main reason was that, just as had happened the last time the Mongols attempted to invade Japan, a kamikaze or "divine wind", in the form of a massive typhoon, whipped up and destroyed the invading navy.

But there were other factors. Kublai Khan promoted a general called Arakhan to lead the naval invasion. He'd distinguished himself in great on-land campaigns, but on the sea he was... all at sea. In terms of the Peter Principle, as a nautical commander Arakhan had reached his "position of first failure". Not just because former successes had led to his promotion to a post he was incompetent for, but because geographically Japan was the Mongol Empire's "position of first failure".



For Arakhan, though, "failure was not an option". He couldn't head home, having failed to crack Japan, and report his failure to Kublai Khan. He'd have been killed. So the biggest single maritime loss of life in the history of the world unfolded off the coast of Takashima, produced by a timely typhoon, samurai bravery, poor boat design (in their impatience the Mongols had seized flat-bottomed river boats to supplement their navy; their indentured Chinese boat-builders had also done deliberately shoddy work on the sea boats)... and the Peter Principle.

Comments

[telemeister.livejournal.com]

One of my personal favourites among these bleak little sayings (the most common probably being Sod's Law: anything that can go wrong will go wrong) is Sturgeon's Revelation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_Law), that ninety per cent of everything is crud. He was, it appears, a sci-fi writer, and people would cite terrible examples of the genre to tell him what rubbish sci-fi was. As a musician and songwriter, living in a world in which most people are content to listen to worthless piffle, I could say the same about music. Or films, or motor vehicles & kitchen appliances.

(edited to add)

The bloody link is messed up. Just copy the whole thing and go.

true but,

[milky-eyes.livejournal.com]

I aggree 90% crude law... and pehaps it's more then that...

if you listen to most conversations you will hear a lot of talking to make a very small point which could have been worded with only 10% or less of the words/times actually used....

but hows this... we should honor 'crude' more seeing that it fills so much of our lives and culture... no? wouldnt that be the wise thing to do?

then there's the... how much flirting and 'dancing' we do just to bed a mate.... now, if its done well and we're all having fun... those are the most charished moments in our lives no?

so not all crude is created the same...

“Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm” - Sir Winston Churchill

which I bring up because... the success didnt just come from the first try... it come after 90% crude was sloshed through the system...

just some thoughts

Re: true but,

[telemeister.livejournal.com]

Wipe yer specs. That was crud, not crude.

Re: true but,

[milky-eyes.livejournal.com]

whatever same thing.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, and i wonder if the Greeks have been revered partly because so much of the crud in their culture fell away over the centuries (many of the other tregedians were probably rubbish and few can have been as interesting as Aristophanes).

Perhaps there is also a law that culture tends to look more superlative the further away it gets from the present, the more the iceberg is submerged (or melts away).

[(Anonymous)]

or tragedians;
few- comedians can have been...

The faster a pedant types to escape his pedantry the more time is wasted correcting

[(Anonymous)]

Oh yes,
the linked documentary (so far) would fill anyone with a yearning to visit Japan , the scientific investigator reverentially bowing, it appears, to the ancient document, the 'hyper-legitimate' attendants, fishermen, mayors etc; who make me think of a Chesterton article i read today about the decline of the 'hyper-legitimate' peasant in the west, in the form of the shepherd of pastoral idyll: perhaps in Japan the democratic 'Ideal Plumber' lives.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Perhaps there is also a law that culture tends to look more superlative the further away it gets from the present

Yes, I think this happens because "the grass is greener on the other side"; you get a rosier glow of patriotism the more you stay away from your homeland.

The faster a pedant types to escape his pedantry the more time is wasted correcting

ie "The more hurry, the less speed"!

the scientific investigator reverentially bowing, it appears, to the ancient document

It's the opposite of iconoclasm; rather, the scientist ends up finessing and expanding on the traditional account, while basically confirming it. Would it be any wiser if it were iconoclasm-by-numbers?

[funazushi.livejournal.com]

I am in the middle of reading Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem. It's a semi autobiographical account of a student sent to Inner Mongolia in the late 60s. Much of it posits the success of Gengis Khan's military on hunting strategies learned from Mongolian wolves. One can see how Arakhan would be out of his element.

[(Anonymous)]

There would probably have been plenty of people involved with the attempt to invade Japan who know that the project was doomed, and for the reasons you say, but who would have been too scared to say anything. Surrounding yourself with people you can kill if they tell you things you don't want to hear might feel great, but it'll finish you in the end. (That story is rally satisfying, though, isn't it?)

Theodore Sturgeon seems doomed to be remembered for Sturgeon's Law, but he wrote some great stories besides.

Steohen Parkin

[(Anonymous)]

Damn!
Really.
And Stephen.

[crowjake.livejournal.com]

sounds like the abilene paradox... well actually I doubt it was that.... but an excuse to link a corker

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

Cream (http://rogermc.blogs.com/tactical/2009/11/cream-yokohama-is-a-mustsee.html)

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

Sound like a proper name dunnit?

"Sebastian Skeleton and Peter Principle hurried down the street..."

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

[spanghew.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

Funny you should say that...the bass player with Tuxedomoon called himself "Peter Principle." It's also somewhat amusing to me that Momus hadn't heard of this idea till now - I seem to recall it was all the rage in the '70s. (Maybe that was an American thing...)

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

Yeah, totally American. I've even used it to refer to myself when I get in a jam.

geographically timely

[pay-option07.livejournal.com]

If Arahkan would have landed all 350,000 bodies it may have been another story.

Mongol timidity, unusual! Maybe Amara!

Amara's law — "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run".

well done

[(Anonymous)]

yet you've (purposely?) failed to mention that, as the story goes, plenty of help in fending off the invasion has been attributed to the divinatory efforts of the Kyoto court at the time; but we know you poo-poo the metaphysical aspects of things anyway.

[bonsai-human.livejournal.com]

in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence

His being the operative word.

Women just get stuck in jobs they are massively OVER-competent in, and don't get promoted unless they are aggressive and mean, or blonde and easy on the eye.

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

applicable term here is "glass ceiling."

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

There was a interesting article building on this recently: the Gervais Principle (http://dev.null.org/blog/item/200911021912_gervprinc), which essentially argues that organisations start off comprised of two types: "Sociopaths", who, driven by the urge to control and dominate, move things forward, and "Losers", who trade control of their destiny for security (these may not be "losers" in the colloquial sense). Eventually, the organisation grows, and those "losers" gullible/idealistic enough to give more than the bare minimum get promoted to a growing layer of the "Clueless", middle-management pen-pushers whose role is to act as a dense insulating layer between the Sociopaths and Losers. Eventually, a company becomes mostly Clueless and collapses or gets cannibalised.