Page 77 - Executive Warfare

Bosses

nothing was wrong because we all needed to pretend we were working for
someone sane.
I lasted just eight months before I realized that I had to go, not just
because Fred was mad, but because he was making me insane. Anybody
who assumes that the king knows what he’s doing just because he’s the
king really needs to go buy the movie The Madness of King George.
Even when the king is not mad, he
may well be incompetent. The Peter
Principle, which says that people will
ANYBODY WHO
rise to their level of incompetence, is
ASSUMES THAT THE
quite flawed. It assumes that there’s a
KING KNOWS WHAT
ceiling, that once a boss reaches his level
HE’S DOING JUST
of incompetence, there are no further
BECAUSE HE’S THE
promotions.
KING REALLY
I’ve seen thousands of people rise to
NEEDS TO GO BUY
their level of incompetence and con-
THE MOVIE “THE
tinue to rise and be even more incom-
MADNESS OF KING
petent, in part because there are a lot of
GEORGE.”
jobs that are just not measurable. If you
are on the faculty of a university with a
large endowment, and you are reasonably good at schmoozing the board
and the kids, and are reasonably kind to your fellow professors, you can
be there a very, very long time and even rise to provost or president while
actually doing nothing to help the academic standing of the university.
I’m not recommending incompetence as a strategy for advancement.
I’m just saying that people need a license to cut hair, but not to manage
thousands of employees. So you can expect to run into incompetent
bosses as you rise. And they may very well fail to fully appreciate how tal-
ented you are.
The good thing about even the worst bosses at this level is that while
they can try to undermine you or compromise you, they cannot hide you.

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