Why Your Manager is (Probably) Incompetent

Welcome to corporate life, where the least competent people make the biggest decisions, and where moving files between shared drives qualifies as “high-impact work.” If you’ve ever wondered why your company is a slow-moving disaster, you can thank three iron laws of inefficiency:

• Parkinson’s Law – Tasks stretch to fit the time you give them.
• The Peter Principle – Promotions don’t reward skill, they punish it.
• Bureaucracy – A self-sustaining machine designed to waste your time.

Want to fix it? Read on. Or just forward this to your boss and let them pretend they already knew this.

Parkinson’s Law: Why Your To-Do List is Bullsh*t

In 1957, historian C. Northcote Parkinson made a ruthless observation: work expands to fill the time available.

Translation: If you give someone a week to write a report, it will take a week—even if it only requires 90 minutes and a strong cup of coffee.

A couple examples:

• You join a Zoom call expecting a quick decision. Instead, you get 45 minutes of “Let’s circle back on that” and “Let’s set up another sync”.
• A two-person project becomes an interdepartmental initiative with a task force, subcommittee, and a Slack channel that pings you at 9 PM.
• Your manager tells you to “take your time”—so you do.

Corporate life is a never-ending game of looking busy. The more time we have, the more we waste. And executives love it because it justifies more headcount, more reports, and more time for them to avoid making a real decision.

How To Fix It:

• Tell people to give projects their own concrete deadlines—not “sometime next quarter.”
• Kill meetings. Just do the thing.
• Stop pretending every decision needs a task force. Implement consent decision-making, allow people to make their own call and move on.

The Peter Principle: Why Your Manager is Clueless

Dr. Laurence J. Peter was a savage. His theory? In a hierarchy, everyone rises to their level of incompetence.

Look around. Who’s the best salesperson on your team? Congrats, they’ll get promoted to Sales Manager—a job that has nothing to do with selling and everything to do with budgeting, forecasting, and sitting in meetings with HR. And they’ll probably be terrible at it.

Why?
Because great performers get promoted until they reach a role they can’t handle.

• The best engineers become terrible CTOs.
• The best designers become miserable creative directors.
• The best marketers end up buried under spreadsheets instead of, you know, marketing.

We don’t promote based on leadership skills. We promote based on who killed it in their last job, then act shocked when they struggle.

How To Fix It:

• Get rid of your middle manager positions completely and kill promotions.
• Give people paths to grow without forcing them into management.
• Recognize when someone is drowning and pull them out—don’t let them sink.

Bureaucracy: The Black Hole of Productivity

Richard Gordon wrote Bureaucrats: How to Annoy Them, but the real joke is that bureaucracy doesn’t need help being annoying.

Signs you’re trapped in bureaucratic hell:

• You need three signatures to buy a $50 software license.
• Legal says no before they even know what you’re asking.
• There’s a “process” for everything, but no one knows why.

Bureaucracies don’t solve problems—they exist to exist. The bigger they get, the more they justify themselves. Government agencies, HR departments, corporate compliance teams—they all run on the same fuel: paperwork, meetings, and policies no one reads.

The truth is, bureaucracy is what companies build when they don’t trust their people. Instead of hiring good people and letting them work, they layer on rules, approvals, and nonsense to “maintain control.” Spoiler: it doesn’t work.

How To Fix It:

• Get rid of approval processes. Most of them exist to make someone feel important. Just create radical transparency and let peer control handle it.
• Kill policies that don’t serve a clear purpose. If no one can explain why a rule exists, delete it.
• Push decision-making as close to the customer as possible.

The Answer? A Self-Managing Organization

The real solution isn’t working harder—it’s working smarter. Instead of layering on more management, rules, and approvals, what if we built organizations that manage themselves?

Self-managing organizations eliminate the bottlenecks that bureaucrats create. They focus on:

• Small, autonomous teams with real decision-making power.
• Clear accountability, without endless hierarchy.
• Radical transparency that replaces bureaucracy with trust.

Companies like Buurtzorg, Viisi and Indaero prove it’s possible. No unnecessary managers. No wasted meetings. Just people solving problems directly.

So, if you’re tired of outdated corporate nonsense, maybe it’s time to rebel against hierarchy and rethink how work should be done.

Want to learn how to do this? Join our Corporate Rebels Masterclass, where we dive into the dynamics of real self-managing organizations.

👉 Find out more here.