The Peter Principle

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Simply put - people rise to the level of their incompetence Laurence J. Peter came up with the Peter Principle in regards to employees. Let's say an employee does his job well, but it's not a complicated job. Is that employee able to move up to the next level? Probably not because he is not competent enough for a more difficult position...because he reached the level of his incompetence. He would be incompetent at the next level. A generalized way to describe it would be if a person was very good at checkers but wants to be on the chess team. He or she wins every checker game. That person wants to move up to play chess. He or she tries and fails - that person is only competent to play checkers not chess because the level of incompetence has been reached.