My last two posts both describe particular effects of what might be called the Incompetence Principle, which can be put into words as:

In any large organisation important decisions can ONLY be made by someone who has absolutely no idea what the whole thing is about.

(The corrollary of this principle is that if something is so flippin' obvious that everyone knows exactly what should be done, then of course since no one can be found who does not understand it nothing is done and the whole thing has to be delayed indefinitely.)

Of course at first such ideas look totally bizarre and wrong, but it is amazing how easy it is to find situations in which they seem to apply. (Hundreds of examples can be found at http://www.clientcopia.com/) so one can see the Incompetence Principle as a worthy companion to Parkinson's Law.

The best known explanation for the phenomenon is that of people being promoted until they reach their Level of Incompetence (ie the idea that anyone who can actually do the job they are paid for will be promoted until they reach a level at which they are incompetent, and then they will stay at that level or in that job for a long time, all the while having little or no idea what they are doing), but of course the whole thing is self-sustaining, because an incompetent manager will all too often (perhaps more often than not) be unable to recognise talent or competence when he/she sees it, and will promote people of his/her own kind.

All of that is annoying in terms of natural justice and for the number of petty irritaions produced (as last two blogs), but it is all the more so when one remembers the number of really incompetent individuals who get appointed to really senior positions and receive the sort of salaries that have recently led to so much resentment of Bankers.

If anyone really has an unusually high degree of talent in a particular sphere and an employer really can derive enormous advantage from the use of that talent, then an employer can justifiably decide that the value of that individual is such that it is worth paying a large salary in order to gain such benefits, and if the talent in question is rare then the person concerned will have a choice of employers and will naturally choose the employer who pays.

That is the justification for the high salaries one hears of, but the evidence of recent events (in banking and elsewhere) is that although really competent people may draw high salaries, there are many people who receive six and seven figure salaries who have very little talent of any kind, let alone a level of talent that should merit a high salary. Time after time one hears of highly paid people making decisions that any average man or woman in the street would know were totally misguided and doomed to fail; we are then conned into believing that said highly paid prat knows more than we do, but the end of the story turns out exactly as any ordinary person would have predicted. Far from being unusually capable, the person being given such responsibility (and being paid so much for that) seems uniquely incapable, so how do they get appointed?

Appointing staff, even highly paid staff such as senior management, is a task that can be done well and produce good results, or can be done shoddily with useless results. To that extent it is no different to any other task where the quality of the outcome matters.

I once spent some years working closely with production managers, and any of them would have taken it for granted that the to ensure that a task is carried out to a consistently acceptable standard there must be an inspection procedure. Someone other than the worker concerned must be in a position to examine the work done. How can this principle be applied to the appointment of senior staff?

What is needed is a procedure by which those to whom senior managers are ultimately responsible can actually assess the quality of an appointment at the time it is made. For companies in the "private sector" this would mean the shareholders, and for any public body it would mean the public, and in either case it would mean that when any appointment is made to a post above a certain level of seniority, the qualificatiosn and relevant experience of the appointee should immediately be made available (to the shareholders or to the public at large as appropriate). The shareholders/public would then have the opportunity to assess for themselves the basis on which the appointment was made, and I have personally been in a position to know the details of many appointments that simply would not have been made if they had been subject to any sort of review of that kind.

(An example of what I mean would be the appointment, some years ago, of a manager of a large IT department. At the time of his appointment, the appointee knew less about computers or any similar equipment than the average person in the street, and had no desire to learn about any such "technicalities", but was appointed ahead of other eminently able candidates because one of his schoolmates happened to be a senior director of the company.)

THINK ABOUT IT !