The Inverse Peter Principle
You may be aware of the Peter Principle (more accurately a hypothesis) which suggests that people will continue to be promoted until they reach a position where they are in effect incompetent and thus do not rise further up the organisational hierarchy.
In the digital economy, this is unlikely to hold true because there will be no hierarchy. There will be experts and there will be those that align this expertise with what the market needs. The latter being an emerging 21st century expertise domain.
This poses a problem if you are not an expert. In other words this is a problem for most of us.
Leaders who are used to setting the vision will be replaced by leaders who can infer the vision based on environmental factors including their access to expertise.
Managers who are paid to goad, charm and bully the workers into doing what is best for the company will no longer have a role where the workers are more motivated and passionate about what they do than any administrator.
Workers who operate in the traditional factory mode of doing the same stuff day in day out and whose thinking extends no further than lunch options will simply not be required. Unless they occupy niches in which there are no economies of scale on which to base the necessary investment in automation.
Thus career job number one is to reinvent ourselves as a genuine expert through acquiring the necessary skills and experiences. And to then alert the world to the new you. This may give rise to the digital economy Inverse Peter Principle, ie a race to genuine competence.
