Laurence J. Peter Quotes

We may well doubt whether our organization is not too complicated, too expensive; whether offices and officers have not been multiplied unnecessarily and sometimes injuriously to the service they were meant to promote.

If you're going to maintain true authorities over a subordinate organization, you have to have some control over policy formulation of that organization and also the resources that are applied to it.

Lacking a profit motive, workers in the government by and large have a different work ethic from those in private industry. When they could make one call, federal workers take a meeting. When they could find an answer on the Internet, they form a study committee. Instead of appointing one supervisor, they appoint five.

Community begins in mystery and ends in administration. Leaders move away from people and into paper.

The War Office is a very slow office, an enormously expensive office, and one in which the Minister's intentions can be entirely negated by all his sub-departments, and those of each of the sub-departments by every other.

Recognition of the inevitability of comprehensive bureaucratization does not solve the problems that arise out of it.

Bureaucracy is like a fungus that contaminates everything.

Bureaucracy gives birth to itself and then expects maternity benefits.

Teams are often pretty clear about what they can do or are willing to do.

The optimum committee has no members.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

With 'Kidnapped,' there didn't seem to be a sure hand guiding it: everything had to be run-up-the-pole, so to speak, and there seemed to be a large committee, every day fighting about what the show was about.

Well, you could take several stories off the buildings of most U.S. government agencies and we'd all probably be better for it too.

Most discussions of decision making assume that only senior executives make decisions or that only senior executives' decisions matter. This is a dangerous mistake.

When any organizational entity expands beyond 21 members, the real power will be in some smaller body.

No matter how many or how few people you have reporting to you, you must remember that as you climb higher in the ranks, your words will be taken as commands even if you're just thinking out loud.

The green-light decision process today consists of maybe of 30 or 40 people.

If a sufficient number of management layers are superimposed on top of each other, it can be assured that disaster is not left to chance.

We always carry out by committee anything in which any one of us alone would be too reasonable to persist.

I confess to a prejudice against officialism and a dread of bureaucracy.

There is little leadership or followership on the Hill.

There are so many elements of the Department of Defense that have to sign off to do anything, that any one of them was able to stop something. The only person who could make something happen was the Secretary of Defense.

Anybody who's ever been in a large organization realizes that 'optimizing' is not a word that would often be used to describe any large organization. The reason is that it's full of people, who are complicated.

If you don't know what to do with many of the papers piled on your desk, stick a dozen colleagues initials on them and pass them along. When in doubt, route.

As a company commander you have absolute definitions: the mission, the people.