The Peter Pyramid: Or, Will We Ever Get the Point?

Book by Peter, Laurence J.

The author of the highly popular The Peter Principle, which asserted that individuals tend to rise to their "levels of incompetence," now applies the same idea to organizations. With an appealing combination of wit and common sense, using often humorous examples, he demonstrates that each of us in our daily lives occupies a position in numerous inverted (base-up) pyramidsgovernmental, commercial, religiouswith many strata intervening between product or service and user or member. The larger and more complex a pyramid grows, the more unstable and subject to malfunction it becomesa concept familiar from current management theory. While conceding that pyramids are an inevitable outcome of economic progress, Peter suggests how simpler systems with clear objectives and a large volume ratio can be devised. Illustrations. 75,000 first printing; $75,000 ad/promo; author tour. Foreign rights: Morrow. January 21
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Peter's newest "principle" is: "Systems start small and grow to occupy all our time and space." In other words, this book attempts to do for organizations what The Peter Principle did for individuals, namely, to show that whole systems are capable of reaching their levels of incompetence. The central idea is clever, and the book throws a number of illuminating and entertaining sidelights on some of the more preposterous aspects of big business, but on the whole it is disappointing. Peter wavers between a desire to render bureaucracies ridiculous and a contrary desire to establish their plausibility. He ends up by giving a list of suggested antidotes to the ills that ail big business, but they are nothing but familiar nostrums under new labels. A. J. Anderson, Graduate Sch. of Library & Information Science, Simmons Coll., Boston
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.