The Peter Principle is a special case of a ubiquitous observation: anything that works will be used in progressively more challenging applications until it fails. This is " The Generalized Peter Principle" . It was observed by Dr. William R. Corcoran in his work on corrective action programs at nuclear power plants. He observed it applied to hardware, e.g., vacuum cleaners as aspirators, and administrative devices such as the " Safety Evaluations" used for managing change. There is much temptation to use what has worked before, even when it may exceed its effective scope. Dr. Peter observed this about humans.
In an organizational structure, the Peter Principle's practical application allows assessment of the potential of an employee for a promotion based on performance in the current job i.e., members of a hierarchical organization eventually are promoted to their highest level of competence, after which further promotion raises them to incompetence. That level is the employee's " level of incompetence" where the employee has no chance of further promotion, thus reaching their career's ceiling in an organization.
The employee's incompetence is not necessarily a result of the higher-ranking position being more difficult — simply, that job may be crucially different from the job in which the employee previously excelled, and thus requires different work skills, which the employee may not possess. For example, a factory worker's excellence in their job can earn them promotion to manager, at which point the skills that earned them their promotion no longer apply to their job.
Thus, " work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence" .
Peter also suggested that ‘super-competence’ in an employee is more likely to result in dismissal than promotion, which again is a feature of poor organizations, which cannot handle the disruption. A super-competent employee “…violates the first commandment of hierarchical life: [namely that] the hierarchy must be preserved…”.
The Peter Principle states that " in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence" , meaning that employees tend to be promoted until ...
SINGAPORE: Member of Parliament for Mountbatten Lim Biow Chuan will be back at the bus stops when the new school term starts on Monday.
Mr Lim said he will be following up on his checks to see if buses arrive on time or if they continue to keep commuters waiting for too long.
In May, Mr Lim acted on the complaints and concerns raised by residents during the General Election about irregular bus frequencies.
He conducted spot checks at two bus stops in Cassia Crescent and Jalan Batu and arrived at the conclusion that services were irregular.
Mr Lim then followed up on this with the Public Transport Council.
The explanation from the council was that bus services 70, 158, 12 and 14 were affected by traffic jams, and that a bus captain was absent from work.
Residents have been promised one more service for 158 during peak hours.
During the school holidays, Mr Lim stopped his spot checks, as the commuter traffic and volume will be lower.
With the school holidays now, Mr Lim said any spot checks may not be accurate.
He said when he resumes his checks on Monday, he will stake out at bus stops once a month until the situation improves.
Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of a community arts festival, Mr Lim said he will continue to act on the complaints and concerns raised by residents during the General Election about irregular bus frequencies in May.
" I sit at the bus stop for one whole hour just to look at the timings of the buses," Mr Lim said.
" Because sometimes, the buses bunch —— they come two buses in a row. And also, one single incident cannot mean that the bus service is not regular.
" So basically, if you don’t board the bus, then you will know for one whole hour, what is the wait time like."
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Faster, better, smarter. No, not humans, but perhaps everything else. In a world of the always improving and never-ending upgrade, it’s possible that human beings are getting left behind.
As workers get more expensive and equipment gets cheaper, the combination is encouraging companies to spend on machines rather than people.
Dan Mishek of Vista Technologies in Minnesota, which makes plastic products for equipment manufacturers, told The Times: “I want to have as few people touching our products as possible.”
Vista spent $450,000 on new technology last year, reported The Times. During that time, it hired two new workers, whose combined annual salary and benefits are $160,000. And, “you don’t have to train machines,” Mr. Mishek said.
But training humans in basic skills may be waning.
With computer keyboards and smartphones increasingly occupying young fingers, the art of cursive handwriting is going the way of the quill and inkwell, The Times reported. Many school districts in America are spending far less time teaching the skill — and handwriting in general — than they were years ago, Steve Graham, a professor of education at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, told The Times. Cursive, which can help students hone their fine motor skills, is no longer considered 21st-century enough.
Richard S. Christen, a professor at the University of Portland in Oregon, told The Times: “I’m mourning the beauty, the aesthetics.”
We may also mourn the loss of speaking up in class. Teachers are exploiting Twitter and other “back channels” like Google Moderator and TodaysMeet to entice students who rarely raise a hand. The realtime digital streams let students comment and ask questions without actually speaking.
“When we have class discussions, I don’t really feel the need to speak up or anything,” Justin Lansink, 17, a student in Iowa, told The Times. “When you type something down, it’s a lot easier to say what I feel.”
It may also be easier to get through class when you don’t have to do the reading.
There are too many books, so don’t read them, says Franco Moretti, an Italian literary scholar and the founder of the Stanford Literary Lab in California. A close reading of books will never uncover the true scope and nature of literature. Instead, Mr. Moretti advocates “distant reading,” which is understanding literature by aggregating and analyzing massive amounts of data, The Times Book Review writes.
The Lit Lab’s computer programs are fed novels that reduce characters into nodes and detect hidden aspects in plots by transforming them into networks. The novel is diagrammed and your “reading” is taken care of for you.
And with the right ball, so is your golf game. A special dimple pattern in the Polara golf ball helps players hit tee shots more accurately.
The ball (beginning at $30 a dozen) can reduce slices and hooks by 75 percent or more. “It’s for people who want to be embarrassed less, play faster and enjoy it more,” Dave Felker of Polara told The Times.
Never mind that part of the game is the challenge of actually hitting it straight.
With advanced technologies, perhaps those mental and physical challenges are getting fewer and far between.
They may eventually create better golfers, students and job opportunities, but are we keeping up?
Mr. Mishek of Vista doesn’t think so. “It seems as if technology has evolved faster than people.”
ANITA PATIL
In school, digital streams take the place of student discussion.
In the Overheated Tech Industry, an Urge to Cash In
By MIGUEL HELFT
SAN FRANCISCO — While Silicon Valley and Wall Street debate whether a new technology bubble is in the making, some early Facebook employees are not taking any chances. They’re leaving the company to cash out on millions of dollars in stock options while Facebook’s valuation continues to soar.
“If you’ve seen the world blow up once, you just don’t know what’s going to happen a year from now,” said one former Facebook employee, referring to the dot-com crash a decade ago.
MENGXI VILLAGE, China — In the past two and a half years, thousands of people in China have been found to be suffering from toxic levels of lead exposure, mostly caused by pollution from battery factories and metal smelters. The cases underscore a pattern of government neglect in industry after industry as China strives for headlong growth with only embryonic safeguards.
Chasing the political dividends of economic development, local officials regularly overlook environmental contamination, worker safety and dangers to public health.
A report by Human Rights Watch this month says some local officials have reacted to mass poisonings by limiting lead testing, withholding and possibly manipulating test results, denying treatment and trying to silence parents and activists.
High levels of lead can damage the brain, kidney, liver, nerves and stomach and can even cause death.
Children are particularly susceptible because they absorb lead more easily than adults.
“No blood lead level has been found to be safe for a child,” said Dr. Mary Jean Brown at the United States’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Despite efforts to step up enforcement, the government’s response remains faltering.
Mass poisonings typically come to light only after suspicious parents seek hospital tests, then alert neighbors or co-workers. The few published studies point to a huge problem. One 2001 research paper called lead poisoning one of the most common pediatric health problems in China. A 2006 review suggested that one-third of Chinese children suffer from elevated blood lead levels.
The state Health Ministry said in 2006 that a nationwide test for children was not needed because their
blood lead levels had been falling. But the number of factories producing lead-acid batteries for electric bikes, motorcycles and cars has since surged.
The industry has grown by 20 percent a year, and is expected to expand further, according to Wang Jingzhong, vice director of the China Battery Industry Association.
China now has some 2,000 factories and 1,000 battery-recycling plants.
Enforcement is spotty at best. Shen Yulin, environmental protection director for Deqing County, said 65 inspectors covered a region of more than 1,000 square kilometers, with more than 2,000 plants.
In June, Li Ganjie, the vice minister for environmental protection, said every suspected lead poisoning case was investigated and victims were treated.
Interviews with 20 families indicate otherwise.
Near Jiyuan City, in Henan Province, nearly 1,000 children from 10 villages were found to have elevated blood lead levels in 2009. Government officials ordered the children treated, families relocated and the smelters cleaned up.
But a recent visitor found children still playing in the shadow of a privately owned lead smelter. Their parents said that local hospitals now refuse to administer new blood lead level tests.
“The children are not healthy.
We don’t know how sick they are, and we can’t find out,” said one villager whose two grandsons were found to have blood lead levels two and three times above the norm in 2009.
At the Zhejiang Haijiu Battery Factory here inDeqing County, where angry workers and villagers rioted in June, regulation of lead emissions was nonexistent.
In June, 233 adults and 99 children were found to have concentrations of lead in their blood, up to seven times the level deemed safe by the Chinese government.
Zhao Guogeng, vice president of Zhejiang Haijiu Battery Co., said the company is covering the medical bills of lead victims. Authorities said the factory’s legal representative has been arrested and eight officials disciplined.
But that is no consolation to Han Zongyuan, a factory worker who said his 3-year-old daughter had absorbed enough lead to irreversibly diminish her intellectual capacity and harm her nervous system.
“My heart was shattered,” Mr. Han said. “We wanted this child to have everything. That’s why we worked this hard. That’s why we poisoned ourselves at this factory.
American diplomat whose achievement in ending the Balkan wars at Dayton in 1995 brought peace to the European continent, died recently.
He was a friend, I’ve thought about him a lot, and one conclusion I’ve reached is that his demise came as diplomacy in a conventional sense died, too.
I’m not suggesting the United States Foreign Service be disbanded tomorrow. As WikiLeaks has attested, it is full of smart, savvy and ethical people. They are still needed. But diplomacy as conceived over centuries — negotiations between hierarchical states with defined borders leading to great accords and treaties that changed the course of history — has almost certainly had its day.
The main reason for this shift lies in some numbers given to me the other day by Jared Cohen, who worked for the United States State Department before joining Google.
He told me there are now over 5 billion handsets in the world, compared with 907 million in 2000. The number of users of the Internet has grown in the same period from 361 million to over 2 billion. There are now more than 100 million mobile phone users in Pakistan alone, compared to 300,000 a decade ago.
The impact of this unstoppable connectivity is, in his words, “completely disruptive to every polity.”
Diplomatic cables have been bypassed by networks that observe no borders and respect no hierarchy.
Goodbye to Potsdam, Yalta, Shanghai, Dayton and all that.
The distinction between the real and the virtual worlds — one that people over 40 insist on making — is simply non-existent to the 52 percent of the world’s population that is under 30. They move seamlessly between the two. Any attempt to divide them just seems quaint.
When people live freely online they do not want to live in confinement within their physical borders.
That is the first great lesson of the Arab Spring. The online sophistication of Tunisian youth, living close to Europe but far from its political liberties, became incompatible with the country’s dictatorship, whose efforts to suppress revolt proved as clumsy as resistance was nimble. The second great lesson has been that connectivity equals organization moving at speeds no state apparatus can match. The most revolutionary idea of our age is that technology equals empowerment. That empowerment can be used positively or negatively.
It can enable people to overcome repression, seek justice, find medical help, secure credit, or even find needed love.
It can also be used by terrorists to recruit and by brutal states to track their enemies. Both Iran and Syria have expended enormous efforts on trying to control the Internet and limit connectivity.
Their ruthlessness is physical and virtual.
The efforts of Cohen, who heads a new unit called Google Ideas, are focused on ensuring technology is a net positive. The basic idea behind Google Ideas is that if you bring together people who understand the tools of our age with people who understand the challenges of our age, the benefits will be large. That sounds persuasive to me.
It is also clear that diplomats are a very long way behind in understanding how they can build on social networks.
If empowerment is becoming increasingly universal, if a hierarchical view of international affairs structured around relations between states is out of touch with the way most people in the world relate to each other, then one of the most pressing questions for the State Department and other diplomatic services must be: how do we adapt our efforts to shape these forces in favorable directions?
At a memorial for Holbrooke in Berlin, the former American ambassador to Germany, John Kornblum, said, “We are coming in to a new kind of world. One where networks will be more important than treaties.
A new kind of diplomacy will be necessary.”
Defining that diplomacy is the work of the next decade. Holbrooke is not a bad example. He never stopped looking forward. And he liked to compare diplomacy to jazz — a constant improvisation on a theme always looking for new harmonies.
What If You threw a $41 million party and nobody came?
A start-up company called Color knows how that feels.
In March, Color unveiled its photo-sharing cellphone application — and revealed that it had raised $41 million from investors before the app had a single user. Despite the company’s riches, the app landed with a thud, attracting few users and many complaints from those who did try it.
“It would be pointless even if I managed to understand how it works,” one reviewer wrote in the Apple App Store.
Since then, Color has become a warning sign for investors, entrepreneurs and analysts who fear there is a bubble in start-up investing.
They say it shows that venture capitalists, desperate to invest in the next facebook or LinkedIn, are blindly throwing money at start-ups that have not shown they can build something useful, much less a business that can provide decent returns on investment.
Color, which says it is overhauling its app, is just one of the start-ups that have driven fears about bubbly excess in Silicon Valley.
The Melt plans to sell grilled-cheese sandwiches and soup that people can order from their mobile phones.
It raised about $15 million from Sequoia Capital, which also invested
Consumer technologies get all the attention these days, but I.B.M. has thrived by selling to corporations and governments.
Profits are strong, its portfolio of products and services looks robust, its shares are near a record high. Its stock-market value passed Google’s this year. Yet, in the early 1990s, I.B.M.’s survival was at stake. It nearly ran out of money. Its mainframe business was reeling under pressure from the lower-cost technology of personal computing.
“I.B.M. faced the challenge that all great companies do sooner or later — they dominate, they lose it, and then they recreate themselves or not,” says George f. Colony, the chief executive of forrester Research, a technology and market research company.
I.B.M. moved beyond the mainframe and built a business increasingly based on software and services. And the company holds lessons for others.
Evolving beyond past success is a daunting task for all companies. But that problem is magnified in the technology arena, where companies can quickly rise to rule a market, until a technology shift opens the door to a new generation of corporate dynamos.
That is the test facing Microsoft, Google and Apple.
So, what broader insights are to be drawn from the I.B.M. experience?
One central message, according to industry experts:
Don’t walk away from your past.
Build on it. The crucial building blocks, they say, are skills, technology and marketing assets that can be transferred or modified to pursue new opportunities.
Those are a company’s core assets, they say, far more so than any product or service.
I.B.M.’s prime assets included strong, long-term customer relationships, deep scientific and research capabilities, and an unmatched breadth of technical skills in hardware, software and services.
It is the technology surrounding the mainframe that pays off for I.B.M. today.
Mainframe hardware alone accounts for less than 4 percent of its revenue.
But when the software, storage and services contracts linked to mainframe computers are included, the figure rises to 25 percent — and as much as 45 percent of operating profit, estimates A. M. Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, a global wealth management firm.
I.B.M. has refocused its research labs and sales force on services and software.
from running smart-grid projects for utilities to traffic-management systems for cities, I.B.M. acts as a general contractor whose expertise spans research, software, hardware and services. These projects
It’s not that I attract unreliable people, I just need to rethink who I trust to spare me the pain of cutting them off later
I have a trusting nature and believe in the benevolence of people. I’ve faith that people want to be sincere, honest and kind.O magazine that said if you often find yourself in disappointing relationships, it’s because your “trust-o-meter” is misaligned and you ignore glaring cues that his conscience and ethos might be disparate from yours.
Sadly, I’ve been hurt, betrayed and devastated.
Friends have backstabbed me, guys have lied to me and relatives have forsaken me.
I concluded that life’s vicissitudes and harrowing lessons were necessary to let us mature and evolve into better people. So I accepted my dismal plight and chalked it up to “character building” events. Like shoes, one can never have too much character, right?
I continue to be trusting but to protect my heart, I now do a Lorena Bobbitt. I cut off anyone who betrays me with an imaginary carving knife, and throw them out of my life into the dark field of the universe.
Then I read Martha Beck’s piece in Oprah’s
She says that it comes from trusting caregivers with undesirable behaviour, like an alcoholic parent, and taking that as the yardstick of reliability.
Often, I’m also guilty of justifying deplorable behaviour because I like the person.
She’s so stressed at work that she has to take out her malice on me, or he really didn’t want to hurt me so he lied repeatedly.
Beck advises that to prevent future duplicity, just look out for obvious indicators of a person’s trustworthiness.
For example, does he usually show up on time?
I was flabbergasted.
I’m usually fashionably late, thinking it enhances my rock star image and I don’t like to stand around waiting. Also, tardiness was a common occurrence in my family. My sisters often turned up an hour after the appointed time. It was funny. Once, I was late and missed a flight. When I went home dejectedly with my suitcase, my mother roared with laughter. I saw that as approval.
To realise that my constant lateness actually put my integrity in question mortified me.
I drowned my sorrow in two large chocolate desserts immediately, then I asked my good friend Shannon, who is solidly reliable and objective, if I was untrustworthy.
She assured me that I wasn’t, as I often gave prior notice if I was going to be late and, more importantly, I turned up when I said I would.
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7% from 2008
57% from 2008