Duds and Grandees

Posted by jlubans on December 21, 2023

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Caption: Grand Opening. Get Your Own Dud!

A fictional Scotland Yard heavyweight in a 1933 mystery novel offers an organizational insight:
"Promotion by routine is the ruin of every public service.
I know only one thing worse, and that is the promotion of a 'dud' into some other service because he stands in the line of promotion.
All the (UK's) public offices, from the F(oreign) O(ffice). downwards, are guilty of it."*
Obviously, it is the author, Sir Basil Thomson, finding fault and anticipating the Peter Principle. He should know, as he was once an Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard.
That role and several others in his varied career gave him an up-close view of what many of us, as employees, have experienced.
As you may know, the Peter Principle from 1969 holds that each of us "will eventually rise to our unique level of incompetence".
Many of us know this is anecdotally true, as did Thomson, certainly as it may apply to others!
I gave my take on it in a 2011 post Which Is Incompetent, the Job or the Boss?
Thomson's is one of the earliest "police procedurals". In P.C. Richardson's First Case, he anticipates Parkinson's Law (1955) that "work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion."
Constable Richardson, a raw beginner but brilliant policeman, soon discovers that all of his pounding of pavements and questioning of dissembling witnesses (aka "real work") has to be memorialized on paper.
That report, among a flurry of others, is then to be read by the chain of command which may include a half dozen office holders - the loftier your position, the greater the pile of reports on your desk.
Small wonder Parkinson's Law helps explain - based on historical facts and figures - why "Every new worker, doing real work, resulted in the employment of two office workers."
As most workers know, overtime, bureaucracies tend to grow incrementally; rarely, if ever, to shrink.
My blog "Double, Double (Administrative) Toil and Trouble" relates my personal experience with these tendencies.
Many of my students are reluctant to believe, fully, Parkinson or Peter (and, if I asked them, they'd be just as incredulous about Sir Thomson's views).
Indeed, Parkinson and Peter found it essential to use humor to sugar coat the raw truth. They confirm what we have long suspected, like Sir Thomson, but offer no remedies.
Krylov (1768-1844) uses his Grandee fable
to illustrate at least how one person - promoted to his level of incompetence - managed to do little damage by doing nothing.
Upon his death, at the Pearly Gates, the Grandee seeks admission into Heaven. He is quizzed as to who he is and what he did while on Earth:
"I was born in Persia, and my rank was that of a Satrap. But, as my health was feeble during my lifetime, I never exercised any personal control in my province, but left everything to be done by my secretary."
"But you, what did you do?"
"I ate, drank, and slept; and I signed everything he set before me."
"In with him, then, at once into Paradise!"
The gate keeper explains his decision to a dumbfounded colleague: "The dead man was a fool. What would have happened if he, who had such роwer in his hands, had unfortunately interfered in business?
Why, he would have ruined the whole province."
If you are indeed promoted into incompetence, there may be something to the Grandee's approach. Do no harm.
This fable was the most censored - no surprise - by the minions in the Russian Empire.
The Czar upon hearing this fable from Krylov's lips, "took him in his arms, kissed him, and said, "Write away, old man, write away."
*Excerpt from P.C. Richardson's First Case by Basil Thomson (1933)

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Copyright John Lubans all text 2023

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