“The Peter Principle has cosmic implications.”
—New York Times
Back in 1969, Lawrence J. Peter created a cultural phenomenon with his brilliant, outrageous, hilarious, and all-too-true treatise on business and life, The Peter Principle—and his words and theories are as true today as they were then. By posing—and answering—the eternal question, “Why do things always go wrong?” Peter explores the incompetence that runs so rampant through our society, our workplace, and our world in an outrageously funny yet honest and eye-opening manner. With a new foreword by Robert I. Sutton, bestselling author of The No Asshole Rule, this twenty-first century edition of Peter’s classic is set to shake up the business world all over again.
This book caused a storm when first published in 1969, battering up the bestseller list to #1, charming readers from Topeka to Timbuktu, and finally, brilliantly, blessedly giving the world an answer to a question that nags us all: Why is incompetence so maddeningly rampant and so vexingly triumphant? The book and the phrase it defined are now considered comedic-yet-classic cornerstones of organizational thought, and in honor of the book's fortieth anniversary, Robert I. Sutton has written a foreword introducing the book to a new generation of readers.
The Peter Principle, the eponymous law Laurence Peter coined, explains that "in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence." Everyone—from the office intern to the CEO, from the low-level civil servant to a nation's president—will inevitably rise to his or her level of incompetence, if it hasn't happened already. Dr. Peter's glorious revelation explains why incompetence is at the root of everything we endeavor to do—why schools bestow ignorance, why governments condone anarchy, why courts dispense injustice, why prosperity causes unhappiness, and why utopian plans never generate utopias.
With the wit of James Thurber or Mark Twain, the psychological and anthropological acuity of Sigmund Freud or Margaret Mead, and the theoretical impact of Isaac Newton or Copernicus, Dr. Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull's brilliant book explains how incompetence and its accompanying symptoms, syndromes, and remedies define the world and the work we do in it.
