The Paul Principle
The Single-Most Effective Tool for Business Productivity Ever
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Most people know about the Peter Principle of management:
The Peter Principle:
A person is promoted to their level of incompetence
The theory is that a person will continue being promoted until they find themselves in a position in which they aren’t succeeding well enough to be promoted again. So there they sit, at the top of the hierarchy and the bottom of their game, influencing the entire organization with their sheer mediocrity.
It’s a nice theory, a good theory. And it’s a theory that I think we all see every day in action. But it’s not telling the whole story.
I have another pet theory, based on years of personal experience and a complete lack of business education, that I call the Paul Principle (named after a guy named Paul). It goes like this:
The Paul Principle:
A person is promoted out of the position in which they can do the most damage.
This point can be most effectively illustrated with an, er, illustration. Note the use of 3D in this chart to emphasize the data’s importance.
Here, we can see that this particular engineer represented increasing risk to the company with every level up the ladder they attained, until they achieved a striking 100% risk. At that point, the company promoted them into management, dropping the risk factor to 0%, a lower level than it had been at since before this person was hired.
While the Peter Principle addresses the position that a person attains, the Paul Principle is about the position vacated. And while the Peter Principle may be personally rewarding for that undeserving person that is promoted beyond their capabilities, and is generally devastating for the company saddled with their ongoing presence, the Paul Principle is the most effective tool that a company can use (italics used for emphasis).
Imagine a hot air balloon that finds itself drifting peacefully down into a lake of boiling lava. Or a swimmer that mistakenly donned cement shoes. In both cases, the ability to get rid of some dead weight (either excess concrete or a fellow passenger) is critical for survival. The same is true for a company that finds itself spiraling toward bankruptcy, where its inability to ship quality products is hampered by people that simply aren’t performing adequately in their current jobs.
But getting rid of dead weight in the corporate setting can be difficult. Usually, there are legal issues involved, and you pretty much want to avoid ever having to talk to a lawyer at work. Also, employment practices in specific countries can often complicate things (I’m pretty sure you can only terminate people in certain European countries in their next lifetime, while some Asian countries require guaranteed income for life for the individual and all of their future descendants). Finally, it’s never a pleasant task for the manager of said employee, unless they never got along in the first place or the manager is compensating for something horrible in their childhood and sees this kind of act as a kind of revenge-therapy. These three factors are illustrated in the following chart (again, with 3D for emphasis):
Now consider the Paul Principle. First of all, it is comparatively easy to implement. All you have to do is promote the person in question. The employee feels good about the promotion and their manager feels good delivering the news, leaving morale intact for another day. Meanwhile, the legal department has no issues with the promotion, and countries the world over are pretty much okay with people being promoted (although some countries may require all relatives to be promoted as well; check with your in-country Human Resources department for guidance).
Meanwhile, the corporation benefits greatly from simply not having that person in their prior role anymore. Sure, they might be doing a poor job in their new position, but the Paul Principle ensures that if they still present a risk to the company, they will eventually be promoted out of that position as well. In fact, some clever people have realized this fact early in their career and made such a hash of things at every level up the ladder that they were eventually promoted to CEO, the only position that is completely free from both responsibility and risk to the company.
The Paul Principle is responsible for promoting weak engineers into management the world over and, as such, is the single most important reason that any software has shipped ever. Let me say that again, this time with a larger font and arbitrary capitalization:
The Paul Principle is the Single Most Important Reason that Any software has shipped Anywhere Ever.
Without the Paul Principle, poor engineering would have blocked all software releases forever. But with the simple exercising of companies’ rights to enforce the Paul Principle, bad engineers the world over were happily promoted into management. These new managers spent entire release cycles in meetings, endlessly debating schedule timelines, feature priorities, and employee performance, while completely avoiding checking in buggy code. Meanwhile, small, effective engineering teams finished the product.
People tragically unfamiliar with the Paul Principle will often point to data such as the following as proof that a strong management team leads to product and company success:
But what these people fail to understand is that the managers referred to in this data came from the ranks engineering in these companies, and that the graph above is only half of the picture. Here’s the complete version of that chart, showing the Paul Principle firmly at work:
This more complete chart makes it perfectly clear that it is not the increasing number of managers that contributes to more successful product releases, but rather the decreasing number of bad engineers that have been promoted out of engineering and into management.
I will leave you with one final quote, or slogan, because I feel like I should:
The Paul Principle: Mitigating Risk by Promoting from Within.
by Chet Haase (Manager)
p.s. Sometimes I write serious articles. Sometimes I don’t. In fact, more often I write un-serious articles. This is one of the those un-serious ones. Don’t take this piece seriously. And definitely don’t think that anything I’ve said here has anything to do with any company that I happen to work for now, ever worked for previously, or will ever work for in the future. Because it doesn’t. It’s just my stuff.
