Why does the person in charge so often seem spectacularly bad at the job? This episode digs into the Peter Principle, the 1969 satirical book by Lawrence J. Peter and Raymond Hull that argued employees keep getting promoted on past success until they land in a role they cannot do, and then stay there. The hosts walk through the classic example of the brilliant teacher who becomes a competent assistant principal and then a terrible principal, and explain why organizations wrongly assume competence transfers between very different jobs.

The discussion then tests the joke against modern research: Edward Lazear's 2000 analysis of shifting job parameters, the 2018 study of 214 American businesses showing top salespeople make the worst managers, and the 2010 computer model that won an Ig Nobel Prize for finding random promotion outperforms merit- ...