The Dilbert Principle in Action: How Companies Protect Incompetence and Punish Talent

If you’ve ever worked in a large organisation, you’ve probably encountered The Dilbert Principle. The idea that companies systematically promote or protect incompetent employees to prevent them from doing too much damage. Instead of dealing with underperformance, many organisations create layers of meaningless management, vague responsibilities, and convoluted decision-making processes that do nothing but protect mediocrity.

It’s a remarkable corporate survival mechanism. Instead of rewarding problem-solvers, many companies punish competence while rewarding those who master the art of looking busy. As Scott Adams notes in The Dilbert Principle:

"The least competent employees are promoted directly to management to limit the damage they can do."

Here’s how it happens—and why so many organisations sabotage themselves from within.

Step 1: Create a Middle Management Role That Nobody Needs

The best way to ensure nothing ever gets done efficiently is to introduce a redundant layer of management.

A great example is the creation of Manager roles with no clear mandate. The Manager is given just enough authority to feel important, but not enough to make real decisions. Instead of streamlining execution, the Manager becomes a gatekeeper who slows everything down, demands excessive reporting, and creates a chain of command where none was needed.

Companies that thrive—Tesla, SpaceX, Atlassian—flatten their structures to ensure that the people closest to the work make the decisions. Meanwhile, traditional bureaucracies add layers of oversight, ensuring that no single person can move forward without going through a maze of approvals. Their managers are doers.

The result? Decisions that should take a few hours end up taking weeks. Or, as Adams wryly observes:

"In every office, there are people who do actual work, and then there are managers who tell them how to do that work in ways that make no sense."

Step 2: Make Sure No One Is Accountable for Anything

One of the golden rules of corporate bureaucracy is to ensure that nobody is ever actually responsible for anything.

If an important hiring decision needs to be made, should it sit with the CEO or the leadership team? Neither. Instead, introduce “collaborative hiring decisions” where no single person has final authority. This way, when a hire fails, nobody is accountable.

Big corporations like Nokia and IBM in the early 2000s were famous for this approach—death by committee. By the time a decision was made, the market had already moved on. Startups ate their lunch because they were willing to let leaders own decisions and be held responsible for them.

When accountability is shared among too many people, it ceases to exist. Adams captures this perfectly:

"When you can’t figure out who is responsible for a failure, you can be sure that failure will be repeated."

Step 3: Keep the Wrong People, Lose the Right Ones

Want to see a great way to drive away high performers while ensuring mediocre employees remain comfortable? Follow this simple process:

• Give high performers the hardest time. The people who work the hardest get micromanaged, forced into excessive meetings, and constantly have to justify their actions.
• Let incompetent employees hide in middle management roles. Instead of addressing poor performance, move them sideways, create a new role, and give them a strategic title.
• Make sure real decisions take so long that high performers get frustrated and leave.

Microsoft before Satya Nadella took over in 2014 is a case study in this dynamic. The company was infamous for its internal politics, where brilliant engineers left because they were buried in bureaucracy, while those who mastered office politics thrived. It wasn’t until leadership flattened the structure and introduced real accountability that the company turned around.

Adams sums it up best:

"Good employees leave when bad employees get promoted."

Step 4: Resist Change and Call It Stability

Companies that protect incompetence often do so under the guise of “stability.”

Whenever someone suggests upgrading processes, introducing new technology, or changing how teams operate, there’s always a chorus of voices saying:

• “That’s not how we do things here.”
• “We need to make sure we don’t move too fast.”
• “Let’s form a working group to review this over the next six months.”

Meanwhile, companies that embrace change and take calculated risks are the ones that innovate and succeed. Look at Amazon, where employees are expected to make decisions with 70 percent of the information available. Compare that to a traditional corporation where a decision to upgrade software takes two years.

If a company refuses to adapt, it’s not stability—it’s slow-motion failure. Adams warns:

"If change is painful, you’re doing it wrong."

Step 5: Delay Oversight for as Long as Possible

The final piece of the puzzle is to ensure that shareholders, executives, or investors don’t realise what’s happening until it’s too late.

This is why companies delay internal audits, shareholder meetings, and restructuring discussions. The longer they can avoid real scrutiny, the easier it is to maintain the illusion of stability while inefficiencies grow unchecked.

By the time the reality becomes impossible to ignore, it’s often too late.

Final Thoughts: How Companies Fix This

Not all companies fall into these traps. The ones that avoid it do three things differently:

1. They reward execution, not optics. They don’t let people create careers based on attending meetings and writing reports.
2. They hold leaders accountable. If you hire or promote someone, you own that decision and its consequences.
3. They move fast. They trust their best people, eliminate unnecessary layers, and make decisions quickly.

The companies that get stuck in bureaucratic survival mode—they don’t just slow down, they get overtaken by those willing to prioritise execution over process.

So next time you see a redundant middle management position being created, a vague hiring process, or a refusal to adapt, ask yourself:

Are we building a high-performance company? Or are we just finding new ways to protect incompetence?

Or, as Scott Adams bluntly puts it:

"The primary purpose of the bureaucracy is to defend the bureaucracy."