Defying Peter's Principle - A guide to sustenance

Peter's principle highlights that in an organizational hierarchy, every employee will rise or get promoted to his or her level of incompetence.  The situation is more visible in the upper strata of the middle management layer, where there is overcrowding.  Also with organizations trying to rationalize cost by downsizing, it becomes survival of the smartest. Here is a remedy kit,  that will help an individual defy peter's principle, sustain and grow.

Maintain Thy Flock:

The Flock is those bunch of selfless souls who are brilliant, always happy and contended without aspirations to grow and are innovative. It takes time to cultivate this flock. You need to look back at the years you passed by in the organization, identify your flock and have them together.  With a strong flock you can get them to innovate and execute while you effortlessly take credit by projecting as if you are giving the directions to the flock to execute. The flock will be your shadow in all challenging situations that you handle, be it with customers or senior management who is looking at you as a candidate for rationalization.  With you being the architect of the screen play in all meetings, laurels come to you naturally. A word of caution though is to take care of the flock, make them feel they are important and create an illusion of grand recognition by throwing in some titbits every now and then at them.

Be the Profane Visionary:

Profanity is a key trait to be showcased if you want to be perceived as an aggressive go getter. Whether it is chairing a staff meeting or reviewing a proposal profanity helps.  When you review, always go with the assumption that everything is wrong and start with an analogy - the more dirtier and vulgar the better it is.  You will definitely get to hear in the corridors that you are a great reviewer and any proposal or presentation needs your scrutiny before it is delivered. With a multicultural and diverse community in place, how can you get away with this?? Acronyms are there to save your day. For e.g.: you can say "WTF" (I leave the expansion to the reader) and you will definitely find a bunch of sycophants around you to applaud you and appreciate your aggressiveness. Profanity can also be used as a very effective diversionary tactic to hide your incompetence and lack of understanding of the subject under discussion.  A word of caution - Study your audience before you apply this technique.

Hallucinate Confidently:

Projecting an aura of confidence is an important pre-requisite to apply this technique. If you get this right most of your hallucinations will be perceived as "thought leadership".   Through your persistent and  confident hallucinations, you would have established yourself as a "thought leader" and you can leverage that to create aspirational business cases, which will increase your equity as a business leader also.

An example could be " Whatever I talk on a microphone in any language should be understood by the system and translated to code. Deployment will be through a IVR system. The system will have a self-recovering capability that will enable a roll back through pre-recorded message instructions that are stored in the system".

Now read the above paragraph again. Doesn't it sound visionary, if you just read it and immerse yourself in it, without even giving the slightest consideration as to who is going to implement this.  A word of caution - don't make any attempts to understand your hallucinations which are revelations that came to your probably in a dream or after gulping four large Johnny Walkers. In addition, don’t ever make the cardinal mistake of trying to empathize with the poor souls who are going to be tasked with the implementation of your hallucinations.

Be a new broom:

If you have exhausted the above techniques in your current organization and you still are in the limelight for all wrong reasons, then be assured that your true colors are out in the open.  A very high probability is that you had Judas in your flock and didn't identify him/her, and this person is gunning for your position now. But don't worry- you can still use the above three techniques to get into another organization.  As the proverb goes "A new broom sweeps well".  You can use the cool off period as a new broom to get into the inner circle of powerful people in the new organization and also cultivate your flock.  A word of caution - this is a time bound technique and you should quickly adapt yourself and apply the above three techniques in your new organization for sustenance; else you will be wiped off without a trace.

Hog the Limelight:

For any of the above techniques to work effectively, you need to be in the limelight. A fundamental pre-requisite that will act as a catalyst for you here is proximity to the people who matter. After all seeing is believing isn't it? You can also follow Machiavelli - "Ends justify means". Even If it requires projecting someone else's work  (be it a member of your flock or someone who trusts you) as your work do it. 

The Fallback:

You feel all of the above are too much for you to handle? You still have an option. Become part of someone's flock. A word of caution - sincerely evaluate yourself against the required traits,  if you are competent enough to be part of a flock, else the outcomes could be disastrous.

 Thank you Mr. Scott Adams for being my inspiration.