The least competent are moved to management to limit damage.
Adams's 1996 inversion of the Peter Principle: rather than rising to incompetence, the incompetent are promoted directly out of the work. Offered as satire, and recognised widely enough to have outlived the joke.
In practice
- A team's weakest engineer is made "delivery coordinator", where the damage is bounded and the title sounds like promotion.
- A department creates a strategy role for the person it cannot deploy and cannot dismiss.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- The folklore of office life