The dry-erase marker didn’t just drop; it executed a slow-motion descent, bouncing off the toe of Marco’s Italian leather loafers before disappearing into the shadows beneath a conference table that cost the company exactly $1,444. Marco didn’t reach for it. He couldn’t. His hands were occupied with the trembling weight of a quarterly projection slide that he didn’t understand, couldn’t explain, and felt no kinship with. Just 104 days ago, Marco was the absolute titan of the sales floor. He could close a deal with a whisper and a well-timed pause. He was the highest-performing individual contributor in the history of the firm, having secured 44 major accounts in a single fiscal year. Now, as the newly minted Regional Sales Manager, he spent his morning arguing with a malfunctioning printer and his afternoon trying to mediate a conflict between two junior reps who both claimed they deserved the same 14 leads.
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The Incompetent Apex
Marco is the living embodiment of the Peter Principle: a theory suggesting every employee rises to their level of incompetence. We see it so often we’ve turned it into a corporate joke, but it’s a systemic failure that guts organizations from the inside out. We take masters of ‘doing’ and force them into ‘overseeing,’ demanding a completely different neurological map.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these misalignments lately, perhaps because I recently suffered my own minor internal collapse of authority. For 34 years, I have been pronouncing the word ‘epitome’ as ‘epi-tome.’ Like it was a Greek volume of lore. I said it out loud in a room filled with 24 high-level consultants, and the silence that followed was so thick I could have sliced it and served it on a platter. It was a moment of realizing I had reached the limit of my own linguistic competence while trying to appear more sophisticated than I actually was. That’s what we do to our employees. We push them into roles where they lose the very language that made them successful in the first place.
“We are burning our best practitioners on the altar of a hierarchy they never asked to lead.
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The Artisan Lost to Administration
Consider Diana T.J., a thread tension calibrator I met while visiting a textile factory in the valley. Diana is a specialist in the most literal sense. She has spent 24 years learning how to feel the vibration of a spinning loom through the soles of her shoes. She can adjust the tension on a silk warp by 4 microns just by listening to the pitch of the motor. She is, for lack of a better word, a wizard. During my visit, her manager-a man who looked like he hadn’t slept for 144 hours-proudly told me that Diana was ‘on track’ for a promotion to Floor Supervisor. I looked at Diana, and I saw a woman who looked like she’d just been told she was being sent to the moon without an oxygen tank. She didn’t want to supervise people. She wanted to talk to the machines. But in the current corporate architecture, the only way to pay Diana what she is worth is to give her a title she will inevitably hate.
The Cost of Misplacement (Diana’s Expertise vs. Supervisor Role)
This is where the system breaks. By promoting Diana, the factory loses its best calibrator. In return, it gains a mediocre supervisor who will likely quit within 24 months because her soul is being crushed by administrative minutiae. We treat management as the ‘next level’ of a video game, rather than a separate discipline entirely. It’s the 14 missed dinners Marco had with his daughter because he was stuck fixing a spreadsheet. It’s the 4 years of expertise Diana will lose if she accepts a role that takes her away from the looms.
The Master Distiller Model: A Different Pinnacle
Reviewing HR Compliance
At the Copper Pot
If you look at the heritage of craft, you see a different model. In the world of whiskey, for instance, the Master Distiller is often the pinnacle. They are kept at the copper pot, at the barrel, at the sensory intersection of grain and wood. A distillery understands that if you move the person who understands the soul of the spirit into a corner office to manage logistics, the whiskey will eventually suffer.
Why don’t we apply this to the rest of our world? We have created a culture where ‘staying in your lane’ is seen as a lack of ambition rather than a commitment to mastery. We’ve been conditioned to believe that the only way to grow is to climb, even if the ladder is leaning against a wall we don’t want to scale. I think about those 44 accounts Marco closed. Each one was a relationship, a testament to empathy and persistence. Now, those accounts are being handed over to juniors while Marco tries to remember the last time he felt a sense of accomplishment that didn’t involve an Excel formula.
(See more on dedication to craft with Weller 12 Years).
My Own Retreat from the Summit
I’ve been making my own mistakes, too. Not just with ‘epitome,’ but in how I view my own trajectory. I once thought I needed to run a firm of 44 people to be successful. I spent 14 months trying to build that structure, only to realize I was spending 94% of my time doing things I was objectively terrible at-hiring, firing, and worrying about lease agreements. I was the Peter Principle in a leather chair. It took a quiet afternoon and a very honest conversation with my mirror to admit that I was a 4-star creative and a 1-star CEO. The moment I stepped back into the craft, the tension in my shoulders dropped by 24 percent.
The measurable relief of stepping back into mastery.
Incompetence is not a character flaw; it is the natural result of a system that refuses to let experts remain experts.
The Path Forward: Valuing the Craft
We need to stop using management as the only carrot for performance. We need to create ‘Individual Contributor’ tracks that allow people like Diana T.J. to earn market rates for mastery without ever having to manage a single human being. We need to celebrate the person who stays at the loom for 44 years and becomes the ultimate authority on how silk should feel.
Value Mastery
Create IC tracks with high pay floors.
Keep Sales Selling
Remove administrative burden.
Redefine Success
Growth is depth, not just ascent.
I think back to that marker rolling under the table. Marco eventually did pick it up, but he didn’t write anything on the board. He just held it, staring at the $4,444 deficit on the screen. He looked like a man who had forgotten how to breathe. The tragedy isn’t that he’s a bad manager; the tragedy is that he was a brilliant salesperson and we killed that version of him to make a mediocre boss. We are losing our best people by moving them up, and in the process, we are making our organizations heavier, slower, and more prone to the kind of structural rot that only comes from having the wrong people in the right seats.
If you find yourself in a position where you are being offered a ‘step up’ that feels like a ‘step away’ from the things you love, remember that the peak of the mountain isn’t always where the best view is. Sometimes, the best view is exactly where you are, with your hands on the tools and your mind on the craft. There is no shame in being the person who does the work rather than the person who watches the work being done. In fact, in a world where everyone is trying to be the boss, being the master of the craft is the only true act of rebellion left. I might still be saying ‘epi-tome’ occasionally by mistake, but at least I’m no longer trying to manage the library. What would happen if we actually let people stay great at what they do?