"Most people have experienced the Peter Principle in action: In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. In other words, people are promoted so long as they excel. When they are promoted to a position where they lack competence, they stay there, unable to gain further promotion and unlikely to be demoted.
This happens because upward mobility generally involves a move into management. The brilliant engineer becomes the bumbling manager. But imagine if programming skills were the “next step” in all career paths. We'd have organizations full of people mucking up software. Instinctively we all realize that the Albert Einsteins of the world are unlikely to have people management skills. And for the occasional obvious genius, we make allowances to provide excellent compensation without management responsibilities. For the remaining employees, however, we construct a ceiling for any promotions that exclude people management—and in the process create legions of perpetually ineffective and unhappy middle managers. To create a positive meritocracy, we must re-envision management as a career track parallel to others (e.g., engineering or marketing), with overlap for some dual-skilled candidates." Also a good article that reminds of the innerent dangers to meritocracy - looks like we are on track so far, but won't hurt to try to keep it in mind : ) http://opensource.com/business/10/8/building-positive-meritocracy-its-harder-it-sounds?sc_cid=70160000000IDmjAAG
_______________________________________________ Hackit Bar mailing list - [email protected] Wiki: http://community.hackit.cx/ List: http://community.hackit.cx/ml/ Forum: http://community.hackit.cx/forum/ Ideas: http://community.hackit.cx/ideas/ IRC: irc://irc.freenode.net/#politis
