Talking About Organizations Podcast Tom Galvin | Pedro Monteiro | Rohin Borpujari | Greetje Corporaal | Catherine Jackson | Miranda Lewis | Leonardo Melo Lins | Samantha Ortiz-Casillas | Sarah Otner | Ralph Soule | Frithjof Wegener

The rapid growth of women’s professional team sports has a far-reaching history, and many contemporary women’s athletes have honored the legacy of pioneers as their inspiration. Included in this legacy is the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) that existed from 1943 through 1954 in the U.S. and popularized through the 1992 film “A League of Their Own,” directed by Penny Marshall and starring a large ensemble cast including Geena Davis and Tom Hanks. In addition to describing the lived experiences of the league’s first players, it captures how deeply embedded and institutionalized baseball was in the US such that fears of losing it due to World War II and the drafting of players into military service caused baseball owners to create a women’s league. The movie touches on various important organizational themes such as gender and organization, innovation, change, professions, morality clauses, and media engagement.

We will examine, through an organizational lens, one of the great sports comedies of the late 20th century, A League of Their Own, directed by Penny Marshall. The movie tells the story of how the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League formed through a fictionalized account of the lived experiences of the players. The movie helped inspire the growth of women’s professional team sports that began in the 1990s and continues to this day.

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We conclude our look at Lawrence Peter’s The Peter Principle by discussing why the Principle is timeless is its quality. Our contemporary experiences with hierarchies may have changed due to greater mobility of workers, but the Principle itself provokes our thinking about management. We also discuss how Peter used satire to present his points and why it seems to be so effective in this particular instance. Is satire a reasonable method to launch and disseminate ideas, and if so, how and when it is most suitable?

The diligent administrative assistant moves up to supervisor but fails. The assembly line worker is promoted to foreman but cannot do the job. A teacher earns a deputy principal position in a school but falls flat on their face. Why is that? Why does this seem to happen across organizations?
In The Peter Principle, Lawrence J. Peter and Raymond Hull not only provides answers to these questions, they delve into all the possible implications. The Principle goes like this, “In a hierarchy, everyone rises to their level of incompetence.” How they derived this principle the subject of our conversation that explores one of the funniest but more insightful book on the perils of organizational life ever written. 

We will provide our take on The Peter Principle, the book that provided the old adage, “In a hierarchy, everyone rises to their level of incompetence.” While the book was written as satire, it touched a nerve of many people frustrated about organizational life. A fun episode!