- HOME
- ENGLISH FORUM
- BADLY WRITTEN, BADLY SPOKEN
- GETTING
TO KNOW ENGLISH - PREPARING FOR ENGLISH PROFICIENCY TESTS
- POUR OUT YOUR MIND IN ENGLISH
- GOING DEEPER INTO ENGLISH
- YOU ASKED ME THIS QUESTION
- EDUCATION AND TEACHING FORUM
- ADVICE AND DISSENT
- MY MEDIA ENGLISH WATCH
- NOTABLE WORKS BY OUR VERY OWN
- ESSAYS BY JOSE CARILLO
- ABOUT JOSE CARILLO
- READINGS ABOUT LANGUAGE
- TIME OUT FROM ENGLISH GRAMMAR
- NEWS AND COMMENTARY
- BOOKSHOP
- ARCHIVES
TIME OUT FROM ENGLISH GRAMMAR
This section features wide-ranging, thought-provoking articles in English on any subject under the sun. Its objective is to present new, mind-changing ideas as well as to show to serious students of English how the various tools of the language can be felicitously harnessed to report a momentous or life-changing finding or event, to espouse or oppose an idea, or to express a deeply felt view about the world around us.
The outstanding English-language expositions to be featured here will mostly be presented through links to the websites that carry them. To put a particular work in better context, links to critiques, biographical sketches, and various other material about the author and his or her works will usually be also provided.
I hope you’ll enjoy the new selections that will be presented here each week.Joe Carillo
40 years later, the Peter Principle found to be quite possibly true
Is there truth to the Peter Principle, the idea postulated by psychologist Laurence Peter and playwright Raymond Hull in 1969 that people in an organization eventually get promoted to the level of their own incompetence?
In a provocative article for the December 17 issue of The New Scientist, UK-based writer Mark Buchanan suggests that if subsequent academic studies are to be believed, the Peter Principle is quite possibly true. “The longer a person stays at a particular level in an organisation,” he explains, “the more most measures of their performance fall—including subjective evaluations and the frequency and size of pay rises and bonuses. It is a finding entirely consistent with the idea that people eventually become bogged down by their own incompetence.”
Buchanan then cites the findings of experts who have attempted to find an explanation for the phenomenon, particularly Stanford University economist Edward Lazear using mathematical models and University of Catania (Italy) physicist Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues using simulations of promotion dynamics.
Read Mark Buchanan’s “Why Your Boss is Incompetent” in The New Scientist now!
