Why your boss is incompetent
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 25 June 2020
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Why is it that the boss never seems to know what they’re doing? The famous “Dilbert principle” asserts that companies promote incompetent employees into middle management to get them out of the way. But Professor David Dunning, co-creator of the competing “Dunning–Kruger effect”, says there’s more to it than that, specifically that the more incompetent a person is, the more confident they can be. Meanwhile, Kelly Shue, Professor of Finance at Yale, says an even simpler idea, the “Peter Principle” helps to explain why people get promoted beyond their level of competence. And entrepreneur Heather McGregor explains why the incompetence of a former boss led her to buy her own company (Picture: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello there, I'm Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Coming up, why so many of us may receive a promotion too far at work. |
| 0:10.6 | One day, somebody will put you in charge of all of your peers. And they will do that based on how good you are at pricing risk, not how good you are at managing people. |
| 0:20.7 | Yes, on today's show, we're looking at incompetence and why so many of us see it around us, |
| 0:25.6 | especially in the boss class. |
| 0:28.0 | There's a reason why the boss always seems to be the least skilled person in the room, |
| 0:32.7 | because by definition the boss simply doesn't know as much as the specialist in each corner of a project. |
| 0:40.4 | That's all to come in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:46.6 | Most of us, I'm guessing, may remember calamitous work experiences in our youth. |
| 0:51.8 | A bit like this one. This is my BBC colleague Zoe Kleinman. |
| 0:55.9 | I was a really bad barmaid. I got a job for about three weeks. I think it was during the |
| 1:02.6 | Easter vacation when I was a student working in a local pub and it was really busy. And they spent |
| 1:09.3 | about 30 seconds showing me how the till worked and this till |
| 1:13.1 | had, I'm not exaggerating, a gazillion buttons and there was a different button for every |
| 1:18.2 | possible drink that we served in this bar and I just could not get my head around where all the |
| 1:25.2 | different drinks were and so I made an executive decision that |
| 1:29.4 | I was just going to put everything through as a large glass of red wine because it was the only |
| 1:34.4 | button that I could see. And then after I left, one of the guys told me that a new person had started |
| 1:40.5 | and they were all really annoyed with him because they were like 60 bottles of red |
| 1:44.9 | wine down according to the stock records but of course they hadn't sold that much wine at all |
| 1:49.9 | and I'm ashamed to say I knew it was because I hadn't used that till properly and I just kept |
| 1:55.8 | quiet and let the new guy take the blame. Perhaps many of us will have cringeworthy memories like this, |
| 2:02.7 | symbol of disasters from a first day at work. |
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