PROGRESSIVE DISCUSSION - MONDAY 4/10

Agree, chicks should be in their nest. So what if one is 45 and one is 48.......


Speaking of Dummfy, Nature Lover.

Why do I keep thinking of the Peter Principle

"Can the "Peter Principle" now be applied to President Donald Trump?

by Dave Haynie, Electronics systems engineer analyzing politics as just another complex system.
Written 4 Feb

Well, not really. Yes, maybe Trump has “risen to his level of incompetence”. But he was never all that competent, anyway.

For those unfamiliar, the Peter Principle suggests that person’s success in their current position in generally the metric by which an employer will judge their ability for advancement. That new, higher position is not necessarily related to their current position in meaningful ways. Once that person is advanced to a level at which they fail, they’re stuck there. No more advancement.

In this way, a corporation moves the capable people out of the jobs at which they’re effective, leaving behind the worst people for those positions, and advancing that formerly successful person to the point of their failure. The cure for this is analyzing how a person’s performance and skills apply to the more advanced position. You may notice that in many successful tech companies, there isn’t a deep hierarchy of positions. These tend to be meritocracies, where the best people get to decide what they want to work on among various projects.

So, in short, no. Trump’s only real success has been as a salesman (aka, deal-maker, aka, huckster, aka conman). And he advanced to President for a large number of reasons. But none really had much to do with his specific success in business or game show hosting. But rather, how his sales skills were able to spin that success as being predictive as success in the Presidency. And his understanding as a salesman that elections, like sales, are more often than not decided on emotions, not logic. And his use of cutting edge data mining technology and psychometry that was an advancement over the system developed under the Obama campaigns that Clinton used. And a really hard working campaign — Trump held many, many rallies and didn’t spend much time raising money. And the timing of the Russian’s Wikileaks emails and Comey’s FBI investigation non-event.

And, most of all, the apparent understanding that it’s never one thing that wins an elections. It’s everything, all at once.

So of course I believe that Trump is at the Failure level now. But he’s been there many times before. And seriously, it has only been two weeks. I think he will continue to prove to be a terrible President in many, many ways. But that assertion won’t be proven for a bit yet, though he’s absolutely headed that way faster than any other President. We’ll see.

Now, if you took someone like Bill Gates, doing the best work of his life at the Gates Foundation, and elected him President, and he failed, that might be more along the lines of the Peter Principle."