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CronoDAS comments on Military Rationalities and Irrationalities - Less Wrong Discussion
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Ah, the old Peter Principle and its opposite, the Inverse Peter Principle.
Peter Principle: If you're competent, you get promoted. If you're not competent but not bad enough to fire, you stay where you are. Therefore, all positions will eventually become filled with incompetent people.
Inverse Peter Principle: Anyone who is competent soon becomes irreplaceable and therefore ineligible for promotion. The only people who are promoted are those who aren't good enough to stay in their current position but aren't bad enough to fire outright.
Both patterns have been seen in large organizations.
I first heard of the second one as "the Dilbert Principal": in any organisation, incompetent individuals are systematically promoted to the position where they can do the least damage: management. Funny (darkly funny if you've come across it personally), but I'm not sure ow true it really is.
Or "Percussive Sublimation" as Peter and Hull called it. Also colloquially called being kicked upstairs, which apparently goes back to 1684. (Warning: TVTropes link. Interestingly, although it has the usual list of media examples at the end, the content is all about real life. Is TVTropes extending into LifeTropes?)
And there are earlier echos:
One of my goals with this thread is to figure out how to avoid such nepotist bureaucratic nightmares, which have historically dominated the long-term outlook of empires from China to Rome to, increasingly, the US.
The traditional solution is periodic revolutions.
I'm not sure you're focusing on the right problem.
The Roman Empire's biggest problem wasn't nepotism, it was that the office of Emperor had no clear rules for succession. This tended to result in civil wars between the most powerful generals whenever it came to be vacant.
This can explain plenty of network behaviour I have seen. Thanks for that explanation!
A useful data point: one thing they repeatedly emphasized to me in management training, was that if someone was irreplaceable, FIRE THEM IMMEDIATELY. Do not promote them. Do not keep them around. FIRE THEM. Otherwise they will become a challenge to your leadership, and you will continue to have to make larger and larger concessions to their idiosyncracies. People must be just competent enough to get the work done, but not competent enough to dictate terms, or the entire leadership hierarchy breaks down.
(This concept was a major contributor to my walking away from future management opportunities)
Are you sure it actually was management training and not a PHB (pointy-haired boss) tutorial?
Can you describe an empirically detectable difference?
Generalizing a particular experience to the entire world is perilous :-) Yours sounds particularly bad.
Management is a necessary skill, a lot of smart people do management, some of them are willing to train others.
True, but that wasn't what I was doing. And if you can describe an empirically detectable difference, I WOULD appreciate it.
However, the specific adage "if someone is irreplaceable, fire them immediately" was repeated to me many, many times, by many different consultants and managers, even before I started that training.
(The original argument for it was apparently different - "anyone who is irreplaceable must spend more time defending their territory / looking for opportunities to be irreplaceable than actually doing their job, therefore they must be unproductive and contentious, therefore firing them will improve company culture" - but it evolved reasonably quickly into "anyone who understands things better than you is a threat to your power base")
I am not quite sure what are you asking. What is proper management training? How to recognize it? Are you doubting that management training is a legitimately useful activity?
By the way, having irreplaceable people is bad, but not because they are a threat. The issue is the "hit by the bus" problem (will your organization survive if the irreplaceable person is hit by a bus tonight?) and the solution is to train more people to the same skill/competency level.
Oh, and, of course, anyone you can fire is not really irreplaceable.
Absolutely. My proposed solution was to reassign the 'irreplaceable' to training potential back-ups, and only firing those that refuse to do so. (A lot of people found this idea problematic, because it could lead to them creating unofficial coalitions and favor networks that did not respect the command structure).
What's up with the fetish of "the command structure" in your organization? The preoccupation with power politics seem very dysfunctional.
It wasn't a single organization; these were consultant seminars, which is why I felt comfortable making somewhat broader generalizations about the corporate environment.
Note that at the time, the subset of consultation I was involved with had something of a hero worship for "Neutron Jack" Welch and was rather obsessive about "innovative business and accounting practices" of the sort that Enron had just been hit hard for.