and that they were likelier to perform poorly as managers, leading to considerable costs to the businesses. The Peter principle inspired Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip Dilbert, to develop a similar concept, the Dilbert principle. The Dilbert principle holds that incompetent employees are promoted to management positions to get them out of the workflow. The idea was explained by Adams in his 1996 business book The Dilbert Principle, and it has since been analyzed alongside the Peter principle. João Ricardo Faria wrote that the Dilbert principle is "a sub-optimal version of the Peter principle," and leads to even lower profitability than the Peter principle. Response by organizations Companies and organizations shaped their policies to contend with the Peter principle. Lazear stated that some companies expect that productivity will "regress to the mean" following promotion in their hiring and promotion practices. Other companies have adopted "up or out" strategies, such as the Cravath System, in which employees who do not advance are periodically fired. The Cravath System was developed at the law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore, which made a practice of hiring chiefly recent law graduates, promoting internally and firing employees who do not perform at the required level. Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths have suggested the additive increase/multiplicative decrease algorithm as a solution to the Peter principle less severe than firing employees who fail to advance. They propose a dynamic hierarchy in which employees are regularly either promoted or reassigned to a lower level so that any worker who is promoted to their point of failure is soon moved to an area where they are productive. Popular recognition The Incompetence Opera is a 16-minute mini-opera that premiered at the satirical Ig Nobel Prize ceremony in 2017, described as "a musical encounter with the Peter principle and the Dunning–Kruger effect". See also References Bibliography Benson, Alan, Danielle Li, and Kelly Shue. 2018. "Promotions and the Peter Principle." Quarterly Journal of Economics. . . Benson, Alan, Danielle Li, and Kelly Shue. 2019 April 24. "Promotions and the Peter Principle." Vox EU. —— 2004. "The Peter Principle: A Theory of Decline." Journal of Political Economy 112(S1):S141-63. . . Peter, Laurence J. and Hull, Raymond. 1969. The Peter Principle. William Morrow & Co Inc. (Pan Books ed., 1970). External links Adages Office work Organizational theory 1960s neologisms Incompetence