Scientific Definition
Promoting your best individual contributor to manager loses you both.
Plain-English Definition
Promoting your best individual contributor to manager loses you both.
Feynman Explanation
Reward great engineers by removing them from engineering.
Core Principle
Promoting your best individual contributor to manager loses you both.
Mechanisms
Pending editorial review.
Promoting your best individual contributor to manager loses you both.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Career structures that misallocate talent.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Inputs (Triggers)
Pending editorial review.
Outputs (Behaviors)
Pending editorial review.
Behavioral Signature
Reward great engineers by removing them from engineering.
Examples
- Peter Principle in action across most tech companies.
- Career structures that misallocate talent.
Pending editorial review.
Famous Experiments
Pending editorial review.
Design Principles
- Dual ladder career paths. Specialist tracks.
Measurement Approaches
Pending editorial review.
Evidence
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
The Perverse Incentive Lens™
How this behavior is exploited — and how to redesign around it.
- Dual ladder career paths. Specialist tracks.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Interactive Mini Network
Click any neighbor to re-center the graph and follow the threads of connection.
Knowledge Graph Neighbors
Auto-linked to the rest of the Human Behavior Taxonomy by family, domain, dimension, and shared keywords.
Fixed thresholds for small business set-asides create incentives to remain sub-scale.
Earn-outs designed to retain founders often demotivate the team they bought.
Funnels rewarded for new logos under-invest in retention and lifetime value.
Cuts that lift margin this quarter erode product quality and brand equity over years.
Narrowly tied bonuses get gamed; people optimize the metric, not the underlying goal.
Re-hires often get raises larger than internal promotions.
Pay tied to stock price encourages short-term price management.
CEO pay tied to size rewards deal-making even when acquisitions destroy value.
Sales forecasts under-set to ensure attainment bonus.
Capital tied to growth rates funds unsustainable scaling and unit-economics denial.
Managers measured by team size grow teams beyond need.
Awards reward visible novelty; quiet excellence goes unrecognized.