Great researchers make for lousy department chairs. Great engineers often make for lousy engineering managers. No reason to believe that a great sales person who knows how to negotiate deals will be a great manager. The peter principle had been around for half a century, no one had ever checked with real data from real companies whether lawrence pPeter was right.
People who are good at their jobs routinely get promoted into bigger jobs they’re bad at. We explain why firms keep producing incompetent managers — and why that’s unlikely to change.