Something Sensible In the Claudine Gay Clusterfuck At Harvard

Continuing to pay her $900,000 a year is an excellent idea

It might well grate that a plagiarising incompetent, an ideologically driven one at that, might retain their vast salary after being, effectively, fired.

But let’s not think about that and instead let us examine the issue with Claudine Gay at Harvard. After her firing as president - oops, having her resignation accepted - she is, apparently, going to still be paid the $900,000 a year that the President gets.

Outgoing Harvard president Claudine Gay will retain a salary of around $900,000-a-year from the university, despite being forced to resign amid a plagiarism scandal.

This is excellent. Fine management. Absolutely the right thing to do.

Now, that Gay is a vile race grifter who has slimed her way up the bureaucracy is a view that some might hold. Others that she’s an outstanding scholar who…..jeez, no one believes that second vomitus. But, we do have to admit that however she did she did reach the top. Turned out not to be able to cope with being at the top too. Hmm, OK. So, we need a sensible, even societal, method of dealing with those we promote to leadership who then turn out to be more ephemeral flatulence than usefully competent.

The answer is we let them keep the trinkets but remove the power. They’ll go easier that way.

Of course, something so obviously sensible is not the result of my own ruminations. It’s the central lesson of one of the only three useful management books ever written. Those are, as all know, Parkinson’s Law, Up the Organisation and The Peter Principle.

Parkinson’s real lesson is that bureaucracy will always colonise. So a major - perhaps the major - job of management is to simply keep firing bureaucrats. Every time the power skirts hire an executive assistant fire the entire department. Up the Organisation has a number of lessons one of which is never to allow the power skirts anywhere near anything by refusing to have an HR department in the first place.

The Peter Principle is a little different in that it deals, at heart, with what to do if you’ve made the mistake of allowing one of the power skirts to actually ascend to a position of any power.

The initial observation is that if you do a good job at some level then you’re going to get promoted. But that new position will come with greater and or different responsibilities that the newly promoted may or may not be good at dealing with. If they are good then they’ll get promoted again - if they’re not they won’t.

But this means that, over time, every position is filled by someone sufficiently incompetent that they don’t get promoted. Very few do get fired - that would look bad on those who promoted them. Therefore The Peter Principle - everyone gets promoted to their own level of incompetence. And also the corollary, all useful work is done by those who have not been so promoted - yet.

This then leaves us with the problem of what to do with those who have, in error, been promoted to that level of their own incompetence. Leaving them there will - over time and if it happens often enough, which it will for it’s inevitable - eventually bankrupt the organisation. So we do want a cure for this.

The Peter Principle tells us that there are two closely related ways of doing this. One is further promotion well away from anything that actually matters. President Emerita perhaps. There are Major Generals in charge of diversity in armies all over the world - no one’s willing to be responsible for the degradation of fighting ability if they were left in charge of an actual regiment. Admirals that no one’s ever going to allow to go to sea ever again for fear of mutiny on the High Seas.

The other, and strongly correlated, is to agree and admit that the elevation didn’t work. So, back down you go - but you get to keep the trinkets. If admission of failure at the higher level led to losing the privileges of that higher level, the income, the $900k - the key to the Executive Washroom where only farts from properly rich diets are to be enjoyed - then those losing them from failure would deny failure, protect their positions, like Mama Bear coming to eat your liver for getting within 50 yards of her cub.

Better, by far, to come to some mutual agreement that they keep the cash, the title, the privileges, then shuffle off to the lecture circuit rather than remain in that position of power where they could do actual damage.

Which is the real lesson of The Peter Principle. And why paying Claudine Gay $900,000 a year is such an excellent idea now that she’s no longer President of Harvard.

Fuck ups are going to happen, the incompetents will get promoted. When that happens then you pay them to fuck off.

And?