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Business
- Michael Scott is Truth in Television for a lot of sales departments. Many companies insist on promoting their best salespeople to management, partially based on the theory that as a manager they will teach everyone else their skills and make other employees now working under them better salespeople. This ignores the fact that nothing about being a good salesperson says that they will be good at teaching those skills to others, let alone everything else that goes into being a good manager. In the end, the skills necessary to make a good salesperson have very little in common with the skills necessary to make a good sales manager.
- John Romero's admittedly high skill as a programmer and designer did not translate to any skill whatsoever as a project leader, manager or administrator. This was painfully evident throughout the Daikatana debacle, which released several years late, several million dollars over-budget, and with several design choices that had a negative impact on gameplay because there was no one to rein in his weirder ideas like when he worked on Doom and Quake. The same could be said of Ultima's Richard Garriott during Ultima VIII and IX (though Executive Meddling by Electronic Arts was also part of the problem there).
- Arguably, Bill Gates promoted himself out of doing work to avert this trope. A talented inventor, a decent businessman, and an okay administrator, Gates really greased the wheels and got his company going. His style of management consisted of the philosophy that you should hire a lazy person to do a tough job because they will find a quicker and more efficient way to do it so they can slack off later on. He took this to heart and eventually put himself in a position where he basically did nothing but oversee the money flowing in while he simultaneously hired much better administrators to work in his place. Nowadays, Gates is mostly known to sit comfy in his mansion and use his vast fortune to fuel his charities.
- Eddie Lampert was an excellent investor, compared favorably to Warren Buffett in his glory days. This led to him gaining control of the merged Sears and Kmart, where he proved so hopelessly incompetent that it was commonly theorized he was pulling a Springtime for Hitler scheme. He had the bright idea to try to convert to a more online model, but did so by pouring tons of money into trying to sell that model to a mostly older clientele, while closing all the unprofitable stores and letting the rest fall into disrepair, and selling off all of the company's exclusive brands for a quick buck. He also tried to apply his objectivist ideals by reorganizing the company into decentralized competing groups - ideals that worked fine for a lone cutthroat investor, but on that scale, turned the company into a bunch of infighting cells that occasionally had to get contract work from their own fellows. He basically focused so much on turning a profit that he ignored how his company actually made money, and when Sears filed for bankruptcy, pretty much everyone involved blamed Lampert.
- Paul Pressler was decently skilled as the head of The Disney Store in the late '80s and early '90s - he allowed it to reach major prominence in the first place through a deal he made with Mattel, providing toys that let Disney offer serious competition against Playskool and Fisher Price, and then built on that with a prototype version of the Disney Store in 1994 where he borrowed the 'land' concept from Disney's theme parks, making the store itself more entertaining to visit in the first place. His success in these ventures was enough to convince his superiors in the Disney company to promote him as the new head of Disneyland, just in time for him to be in the position to oversee a radical new development the park was set to undergo in an effort to combat decreasing guest and customer numbers as well as reduce costs. Unfortunately, the great skill that he'd shown in handling The Disney Store proved a poor fit for what would be required to be a capable head of a theme park, and he's largely held responsible for the severe Audience-Alienating Era that Disneyland is agreed to have suffered from 1996 to 2003. In his efforts to save money, he chose to severely reduce attraction maintenance hours, operating hours, as well as the number and variety of merchandise for sale at the park, and also straight up shut down several smaller low-capacity attractions while also severely reducing the intended budget for a planned revamping of Tomorrowland. Things only got worse when he got subsequently promoted to serving as head of Disney's entire theme park division in 2000, as his efforts to further cut costs and avoid overspending over the course of the construction and eventual opening of Disney's California Adventure resulted in him placing a disproportionate amount of emphasis on shops and dining venues instead of shows or proper attractions, which heavily contributed to the park's spectacular initial failure. Ultimately, it wouldn't be until Pressler eventually resigned from Disney in 2003 and took on a new position as head of The Gap that Disneyland was finally able to start repairing the damage that Pressler had inflicted upon it by treating it like a shop instead of a proper theme park.
- Marissa Mayer
was highly regarded during her time at Google as a product manager and eventually the vice president of search products and user experience, overseeing the design of Google's simple search homepage and most of their product suite. In 2012, she left Google to become the CEO of Yahoo!, where it quickly became evident that her strengths as an engineer and product manager didn't translate to managing the finances and corporate operations of an entire company. Mayer instituted several unpopular management decisions like ending remote work, spent $1.1 billion acquiring Tumblr (which was sold off six years later for only $3 million, while passing on other possible acquisitions like Hulu and Netflix), and Yahoo’s core business continued to decline under her leadership. By the time she left the company in 2017 after it was acquired by Verizon, a survey had recently ranked her as the least liked CEO in tech. In her defense, though her decisions as its CEO certainly didn't help, Yahoo had already been in a downward spiral for years at that point and turning around the company may have been an impossible task for anyone.
Entertainment
- Marvel:
- Joe Quesada is a pretty good artist, but his skills as a writer or editor have been criticized. When he got promoted to editor in chief, there was a lot of backlash. In the position, he's proven to be great at marketing and promotion, but his contributions to the high-level creative process have not been greeted with much acclaim.
- Brian Michael Bendis, another major figure at Marvel, made his name on books like Alias, Daredevil, and Ultimate Spider-Man, which featured slow-burn pacing, street-level stories, personal stakes, small casts, and a relative blank slate to work with. His success there led to him being given the responsibility of writing books on a greater scale, with lots of pre-established characters and continuity (big team books or Crisis Crossovers). There, his writing is at best controversial - blank-slate approaches leading to Out of Character moments and forgetting crucial details, an expanded cast showing a lack of variety in personalities he could write, bigger stakes and powerscales were something he just didn't have the creativity to support, and slow-burn pacing leading to issues in action stories where nothing really happens and there's no action. This has led to a lot of people becoming wary when it was announced that Bendis would be writing for Superman in Spring 2018.
- DC Comics: Geoff Johns. He's had an impressive track records for comics, elevating Green Lantern to Batman and Superman levels most notably. He was appointed head of the DC Films studio branch, in charge of the DC Extended Universe. The film into which he had the most input, Justice League, was critically panned but he left DC Films in December 2017. On a less grandiose note, he's been repeatedly noted as having serious issues writing certain characters and areas of the DC universe (the Wonder Woman mythos in particular is rarely well-served by his pen), yet his status as a major scribe for the company as a whole and frequent architect of big crossovers in particular keep putting him in positions where he is in charge of doing so.
- Rick Remender. Put him in charge of smaller comic books and he is brilliant. Put him in charge of major titles and he is a disaster.
- Gene Roddenberry created what is probably the most enduring, popular and influential science fiction franchise in television history with Star Trek, and if you listen to long term fans of the franchise, his brilliance is unmatched, and he alone could produce quality Star Trek. There's no question that his active involvement being in creative control of just the one TV series throughout the majority of its first two seasons made for a superlative program that deservedly made history, and most would agree there was a significant drop in quality when he left that position due to arguments with the network. However, that ignores that he had a great crew like Gene Coon as head writer. Furthermore, by the late 1970's, Roddenberry's expansion of his TV series into a film and literature franchise while also wresting away creative control from anyone else was a firm example of this trope. His working with Paramount on Star Trek: The Motion Picture caused them to kick him upstairs to "consultant" while Harve Bennett handled the remainder of the films (aside from the final TOS-era film). When he came up with the first sequel series, Star Trek: The Next Generation and attempted to be its show-runner for the first season, the result was easily the worst season in that series' run, nearly leading to cancellation. He was Kicked Upstairs again, with the writers and directors mainly only worried about pleasing him when he would sit in on meetings, but otherwise writing around his demands whenever he wasn't there. He was great at running one show during his youth, but as an older man trying to keep an entire franchise running, he nearly destroyed it.
- Keiji Inafune was a decent character designer who swiftly rose through the ranks to become something of a steward for the Mega Man franchise, managing to keep it going steadily for two decades. In 2006, Capcom promoted him to Senior Corporate Officer, where he spearheaded an initiative to appeal to Western audiences by creating and commissioning many games with Western design philosophies—barring the Dead Rising series, many of these games proved to be failures, and Inafune quickly became infamous for butting heads a lot with Capcom management and insisting they were stuck in the past. He found his level of total incompetence when he went solo and founded Comcept, whose most notable project, Mighty No. 9, proved to be a Stillborn Franchise due to abysmal management and overpromising.
- Several people associated with Doctor Who:
- Having Douglas Adams write for the show was well-received, as his writing style was perfectly suited to the lighter and more comedic tone of the late seventies. Making him script editor for Season 17 made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. Adams was infamous for procrastination and irreverent attitude towards work. Season 17 is widely seen as one of the weakest years of the show, with the only positively-received stories in it being the two that he had a hand in writing, "City of Death" and the belatedly-completed "Shada".
- John Nathan-Turner worked on the show in various different capacities over the years, as floor assistant, production unit manager and production manager. In 1980, he took over as producer and oversaw the show throughout The '80s, making him the show's longest serving producer. While early reception was positive, with Season 18 being considered a high point of the series, his tenure was marked by increasingly controversial and at times questionable creative decisions which displeased his cast, colleagues, and fans. It got to the point where a poll in 1986 revealed that over 80% of fans wanted a new producer. It didn't help that he planned to leave the show along with Peter Davison and was "compelled to stay" literally because nobody else wanted the job, and by the time that poll was conducted, the BBC threatened to cancel the show (which they did anyways in 1989) and blacklist him if he left (he resigned anyways in 1990). In a 2013 interview, former writer Terrance Dicks directly attributed Nathan-Turner's failures to this trope:"There was a decline, without a doubt. I think the people working on it, particularly John Nathan-Turner, were not fit for purpose, as it were. Colin Baker, for example, never got a chance with that silly costume, which I thought was a great shame. I was sorry, but I wasn't surprised when they took it off."
- Steven Moffat is better-liked as a guest writer than as the showrunner. His contributions to the show included two brilliant romances for the Doctor and the iconic Weeping Angels. He received particular acclaim for complicated plots that made fuller and more thoughtful use of time travel than most other writers and for having unusually abstract and creative monsters that scared many people. However, once he became showrunner, his popularity decreased. His "timey-wimey" plots were fairly restrained in a single episode or a two-parter, but across a series or several, they tended to become too complicated, and there was often a sense that Moffat didn't really know how he was going to resolve them. His abstract monsters, despite being original concepts, also struggled to achieve the same long-term intimidation factor as old favorites like the Daleks or The Master. In interviews, Moffat himself often sounded miserable and overworked in his new role.
- This criticism also dogged Chris Chibnall's run; he's better equipped to be a head writer for the series than a showrunner and producer. As a writer for the show, Chibnall was a 3-time nominee for a Writers' Guild of Great Britain award for best series despite only winning once in 2007. His work on Broadchurch also won him a writer's award from the Broadcasting Press Guild Awards in 2014. As the producer for the 11th series of Doctor Who though, the public had mixed opinions on season 11, and season 12 received the lowest ratings out of any seasons from the revival franchise.
- John Kricfalusi, according to Sick Little Monkeys. While the book credits his talents as a director and artist, it makes no secret that he was an absolutely terrible leader due to his refusal to compromise on anything. He easily gets drunk on any power given to him and uses it as an alibi to abuse his staff when he doesn't get exactly what he wants or even take out his personal anger on them if he sees fit, and generally acts like a Know-Nothing Know-It-All in order to keep up an appearance of total autocracy, refusing to take responsibility or even blaming other for his own actions. Kricfalusi ended up being booted from The Ren & Stimpy Show after only two seasons thanks to his poor management, and later projects that gave him more creative freedom were beset by further production difficulties thanks to his perfectionism and inability to compromise, culminating in Cans Without Labels coming out six years overdue in a visibly lopsided state.
- When Lorne Michaels left Saturday Night Live after five seasons, his replacement as producer was Jean Doumanian, who had been responsible for booking the celebrity guests on the show. While she may have excelled in that role, putting her in charge was widely seen as a disastrous move, as she had practically no understanding of comedy whatsoever. One writer recalled that he had barely settled into his office before getting a petition demanding that she be fired. She oversaw the 1980-1 season, which is widely considered one of the biggest disasters in the show's history and she was ousted before it finished. She will forever be known as the woman who almost ran SNL into the ground.
- Fellow Saturday Night Live alum Dana Carvey struggled with this his entire professional career. An extremely talented impressionist and physical comedian and a creative fountain of ideas, he produced all kinds of great sketches that killed on stage in front of live audiences, or when he collaborated with other great comedic minds like Mike Myers on comedies like Wayne's World. Unfortunately, when given full creative freedom and allowed to chase his imagination's id to his heart's content, Carvey quickly proved too esoteric and weird to find success without a moderating influence to tell him "no" or a filter to help make his ideas more digestible to general audiences, resulting in the failure of solo projects he helmed himself like The Dana Carvey Show or The Master of Disguise.
- An instance of this was one of the (admittedly many) contributing factors behind the Troubled Production and eventual scathing failure of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. While producer David Garfinkle had previously had some degree of experience with producing prior, he'd primarily been the one handling the accounting and lawyer based elements of the business while his partner Tony Adams, who had originally been set to serve as the primary producer for the play while having Garfinkle around to 'learn the ropes' so as to eventually become a proper artistic producer in his own right, handled the artistic/creative side of producing. Unfortunately, after Adams suffered a stroke on the day that the contract papers for Bono and The Edge were being signed and died in the hospital a mere two days later, Garfinkle was forced to take full producer responsibilities on the fly. Garfinkle, well aware of how inexperienced and in well over his head he was, ultimately chose to let director Julie Taymor handle all the creative decisions while he worried about the financing. Unfortunately, without a steady supervising figure to tell her 'no' when as much was required, her artistic side ultimately got out of control, contributing heavily to the show's ultimate spectacular failure.
Military
- Hermann Göring. A 22-victory Ace Pilot and winner of Pour le Merite (the coveted Blue Max), he commanded Jasta 11 after Manfred von Richthofen's death in 1918 and Jagdgeschwader I (of which Jasta 11 was a part) until the end of WWI. He was recognized as a dashing pilot and an able wing commander: he found his level of incompetence in WWII as Generalfeldmarschall and commander of the Luftwaffe. He promised more than the Luftwaffe was able to provide, and his pomposity and leadership style was simply not suitable for such a position. The prescription painkiller addiction that eventually forced him to de facto retire in 1943 surely didn't help.
- General Sir Redvers Buller, VC. Buller made his reputation with some really fearless battlefield behaviour that deservedly won him Britain's highest honour. Unfortunately it also won him promotion in line with this trope. When he was immediately subordinate to a better field commander, he did as well as any other general. Left to his own devices, not so much. The fact that the 'd' in his forename is silent meant that he got called "Reverse" Buller after his disasters in the Boer War. Again, deservedly.
- Captain Ernest Medina, who was indirectly responsible for the My Lai massacre. He had been a mustang (an officer risen from enlisted ranks) and he had been an excellent sergeant. Unfortunately, he was completely unsuitable as an officer. He did not support his men, and he used one of his platoon leaders, Lt. William Calley, as a Chew Toy and bullied him relentlessly. It didn't help Calley himself was somewhat The Neidermeyer and incompetent as an officer (e.g. he didn't know how to read maps). In the aftermath of My Lai, both officers were drummed out of service, and Medina barely avoided prison.
- Luigi Cadorna is a shining example of this in Italian history. While a magnificent staff officer and manager, his preference for offensives at all costs (something frequent among European generals at the time) and love for the harshest discipline made him a bad battlefield commander, getting him passed over for operative commands multiple times (most humiliatingly when command of the invasion of Libya was given to Carlo Caneva, himself an officer of dubious abilities at best but still having crushed Cadorna in a wargame), until the sudden death of the commander in chief Alberto Pollio (an equally capable manager and a superior tactician and strategist) and his own seniority saw him promoted to commander in chief. As commander in chief he was fast to learn the value of superior firepower and intelligent enough to create one of the first groups of specifically-trained shock troopers to defeat trench lines and orchestrate an effective (if callous) strategy based on his larger reserves of manpower, but his ruthlessness and lack of creativity ruined any chance for a quick victory and gave him a horrendous reputation (especially because superior generals did exist: the Duke of Aosta is rightly known as the best Italian general of the war and Undefeated Duke, and didn't get Cadorna's job only because the king feared he'd use it to take over the throne; and Armando Diaz, Cadorna's successor and a pupil of the Duke of Aosta who was so formidable that, when ennobled, his title was that of Duke of Victory). Cadorna is mostly infamous among history enthusiasts for having attacked the Isonzo River twelve times, losing every time and culminating in the greatest defeat in Italy's modern history at Caporetto.
- Carlo Caneva, while a capable general in the peculiar terrain of Italy, just couldn't understand that Libya's flat desert plains were the perfect terrain for cavalry, preventing him from achieving an easy victory at the start of the invasion and dooming the Italian occupation to a long guerrilla war.
- General John Charles "J.C." Meyer was a top-scoring fighter ace and a superb squadron leader in WWII and Korea, credited with 26 air-to-air victories and heroism for his actions over airfield Y-29 in Belgium. As the Commander-in-Chief of Strategic Air Command during the Vietnam War however, he gained a reputation as a micromanager who failed to understand the severity of North Vietnam's SAM missile threat against B-52 bombers, costing the Air Force valuable planes and pilots during Operation Linebacker II.
- Many of Napoleon's marshals suffered from this: they were very competent as divisional or corps commanders, which was why they were promoted in the first place, but they proved unable to command larger units efficiently. Grouchy is a well-known example. He was one of the finest cavalry generals of the Grand Army and also had occasions to demonstrate his skill with infantry, but as Waterloo proved, he did not function well as an independent commander. This was used against him by the Sixth Coalition in the 1813 German Campaign: after some initial French success, the Allies, following the Trachenberg Plan put together by Clausewitz, Radetzky and the Swedish Crown Prince Charles John (formerly one of Napoleon's marshals as Jean Bernadotte), started avoiding battle with Napoleon whenever they could and confronting his marshals, causing heavy losses to the French and preventing Napoleon from fully taking advantage of his previous victories until they achieved an overwhelming numerical superiority, resulting in Napoleon's utter defeat.
- From the Three Kingdoms period of China (made famous by Romance of the Three Kingdoms):
- Zhuge Liang's protege Ma Su. While the Romance portrays him as being young, cocky and overconfident, historically he was a competent officer who managed to contain a large rebellion within Shu's borders long enough for Zhuge Liang to lead reinforcements put the rebellion down. Unfortunately for Ma, Zhuge liked him a lot and put him in charge of a vital position (over more veteran generals). It didn't end well for him.
- The historical Guan Yu was a valiant frontline general, but when he was placed in command of Liu Bei's territory in Jing Province his character flaws (mostly his great arrogance) proved detrimental to Liu's cause. He aggravated Liu's neighbour and nominal ally Sun Quan through shows of disrespect note , and also alienated many officials and notables of the region with his attitude. When Sun's general Lu Meng launched an invasion of Liu's territory while Guan was waging a campaign against Cao Cao's forces, he managed to sieze almost all the territory without a fight.
- Xiahou Dun, The Dragon to Cao Cao. As a general under Cao Cao's command, he performed well. As an independent commander, he once fell into an ambush despite being specifically warned the terrain was perfect for it, and on another occasion actually got so lost he accidentally led his men right into the enemy's main camp (though the enemy, thinking it was a night raid, fled in panic). However, once he was promoted to supreme commander over 28 armies, he was absolutely brilliant. Part of this is because while physically powerful and incredibly brave, and thus a great frontline general when fighting alongside his men, Xiahou was too Hot-Blooded to operate as an effective frontline commander. On the other hand he was an absolute genius at logistics, making him far more suited for high command and grand strategy. This is one of rare examples of a man being the inverse of the Peter Principle and the Dilbert Principle at the same time. He was promoted to a position of incompetence and then promoted to a position of competence instead of rotting in his old position or being kicked upstairs to get him out of the way. note
- Chairman Mao Zedong was a calligrapher, poet, and military leader who literally wrote the book on guerrilla warfare. Under his leadership, Mao saved the Communist Party of China (CPC) from certain annihilation by Chiang Kai-shek's purges, rebuilt the tattered Communist forces to outwit both the Japanese and Nationalists, and ultimately contributed to the CPC winning the Chinese Civil War in 1949. He obviously earned his position as the leader of a new country, but soon it was revealed that he was absolutely incompetent in running a country and understanding the basics of the economy, and promoted harebrained ideas such as plowing fields to a great depth in order to increase crop yields (which increased soil erosion), melting down household steel in crude backyard furnaces to increase steel production (which only produced worthless iron, and didn't address how to make more "steel" once everyone complied with the order), as well as exterminating sparrows under the belief that they steal grain (which led to devastating plagues of insects, that the sparrows ate). These, together with unrealistic production goals, suppression of criticism, and overall lack of impartial reporting, contributed to one of the worst famines in world history which led to the deaths of around 35 million people.
- The United States military is not immune from this trope:
- In Band of Brothers, Herbert Sobel is the first leader of Easy Company, and excels in the position, training a company that is tougher and more effective in a training environment than any other airborne company. However, when actually out in the field, he suffers from the fact that he has poor leadership skills, all his subordinates basically hate him, and he is completely useless in combat. Fortunately for Easy, he is reassigned to head up a training camp for airborne (his actual strength) before the invasion of Normandy. He's later found still at Captain rank (the same rank he was when he was reassigned) working a menial logistics postion.
- In Generation Kill, it's pointed out that many of 1st Force Recon's officers were mostly logistical staff, as Recon was usually commanded in the field as an elite unit of 1st and 2nd Lieutenants, and skilled, experienced non-commissioned officers (Sergeants and lower). The decision to deploy all of 1st Force Recon to the Iraq War resulted in officers highly skilled in administrative positions suddenly forced into combat positions, in which they were not very competent. Evan Wright, the author, makes a point to not name these officers by their real names, as he feels that it is unfair to them.
- Semyon Budyonny, while a cavalryman during World War I, was known as a Sergeant Rock and A Father to His Men — Budyonny reportedly punched his commanding officer when he discovered his apathy to his soldiers' unenviable conditions, and in return the men saved him from a court-martial and execution by claiming the CO had merely been kicked by a horse. After defecting to the Bolsheviks, he made his name as a brilliant tactician during the Russian Civil War and is regarded as being critical to the Bolshevik victory at the end of 1919; his actions won him the praise of Leon Trotsky, who not long prior had derided cavalry as the stuff of aristocrats and reactionaries. By the 30s, however, he was an Armchair Officer who was so deeply entrenched in his ideas that he refused to believe that horse cavalry had become any less relevant in modern warfare. Budyonny was so disdainful of tanks that he claimed their use amounted to ''sabotage''. This might not have been particularly problematic if he hadn't been made one of the first five Marshals of the Soviet Union in 1935; his importance in the Soviet military hierarchy combined with his sheer stubbornness led to the loss of 1.5 million men and the biggest encirclement in the history of warfare when World War II broke out. Geoffrey Regan writes, "So elevated was he in the military profession in relation to his ability that oxygen starvation must be suspected."
- Several notable examples from the American Civil War, where the high attrition rate among commanders and officers often led to soldiers being promoted quickly up the ranks to replace them:
- Before the war, General George McClellan had been an Army captain and then an instructor at the officer school at West Point, where he was known as an organizational and logistics expert. In the early days of the war, McClellan won several small victories, and because he was about the only Union general winning any victories at the time (at least in the Eastern theater of the war, which then as now tended to get much more attention), this immediately catapulted him to being a national hero. He was promoted and made a number of absolutely critical reforms, including strengthening the defenses of Washington D.C., reworking and massively improving the logistics of the Union Army, note and he was rightly praised as a master when it came to training armies for the Union. However, when he was made overall commander of all of the Union Armies (including the key Army of the Potomac) following the retirement of the elderly General Winfield Scott, McClellan tried to be a fighting commander instead of "just" an organizational and logistics expert, and proved to be a hopeless incompetent so indecisive, cowardly, arrogant, and insubordinate to President Abraham Lincoln that his poor performance as a field commander has been blamed for prolonging the war. His dithering infamously squandered every advantage he was ever given, including times when the written plans of the enemy army fell into his hands. After being all-but forced out of the role of high command, McClellan attempted to parlay his early military successes into a political career, as he ran against Lincoln in the 1864 election, and tried to spin his failures as being the result of the Lincoln administration's interference rather than his own fault. However, the fact that better commanders than him were showing success under that same administration undercut his argument, and combined with a program to allow the soldiers in the ranks to vote, Lincoln won a second term, ending McClellan's ambitions for higher office permanently. Ironically, if he'd stayed in Washington doing what he did best in organizing and training armies and let someone better suited to battlefield command handle matters on the battlefield, McClellan likely could have been given a superior rank to Ulysses S. Grant, as perhaps Chief of Staff.
- This trope also applies to McClellan's replacement as commander of the Army of the Potomac, Ambrose E Burnside. Burnside was a gifted corps commander, but he himself knew he wasn't suited to command the entire army. He only reluctantly agreed when told that his hated rival Joe Hooker would be put in command if he refused. So Burnside accepted and led the Union to arguably their most humiliating defeat in the entire war at Fredericksburg, where he repeatedly sent in his troops against an elevated, fortified enemy. He soon got demoted again, where he had more success, capturing Knoxville and defeating James Longstreet in Tennessee.
- General John B. Hood of the Confederate States of America was an example on the other side. An excellent brigade and division commander, he was merely competent at the corps level and performed poorly while in command of an army. When he was put in command of the Army of the Tennessee opposing Union General William Tecumseh Sherman's Atlanta Campaign, he did so much damage to his own forces due to his preference for offensive maneuvers that by the time he was compelled to abandon Atlanta and retreat, about 30,000 men were left in his army, down from a height of more than twice that in about 65,000. In comparison, Sherman's forces at their peak numbered 112,000 and retained 81,000 by the end of the campaign. Crucially, the Union forces could be quickly replenished, while the Confederacy was facing a dire manpower shortage. His army was ultimately utterly annihilated by the Union General George Henry Thomas, his old teacher, knocking an entire region out of the Confederacy and the war.
- The aforementioned James Longstreet was considered by General Robert E Lee to be one of his most capable subordinates, even referring to him as "my old War Horse". Following the unfortunate death of Stonewall Jackson, Longstreet was called upon to take up a larger share of the responsibilities in the army, which Longstreet and Jackson had been splitting until this point. However Jackson and Longstreet were very different commanders,note and as a result Longstreet, while capable, did not duplicate Jackson's gift for stunning success at a time when the Confederacy was desperately hoping for stunning success. Some historians (mostly the ones who refuse to find any fault with Lee or admit that Pickett's Charge was at best a reckless idea from the start), give Longstreet partial blame for the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg, where he disagreed with General Lee's plans for the battle. The previously mentioned historians argue that Longstreet was slower to act in this situation and less forceful than he normally would've been, and is partially at fault for the Confederate defeat in the largest land battle in the history of North America.
- Ironically, "Stonewall" Jackson's death before the tides of war really turned against the South probably prevented this from happening to him; Longstreet was better suited for the defensive grind the war became after Gettysburg than Jackson, who was brilliant as an offensive general but didn't show the same level of ability in the few defensive actions he commanded. Jackson's daring, aggressive, and casualty-heavy methods would have been a poor fit for a time when the South was desperately short on manpower and their best hope was to try to draw the war out long enough for the Northern States to grow tired of the war and accept Southern independence.
Politics
- In general, this happens often when politicians who have made their names in regional politics try their hand at national office. The problem becomes worse the more centralized a government is: less overall responsibility being delegated to regional officials and more to national ones means the gap between, say, a governorship and the all-encompassing fields a head of state or government has to handle is starker. Governors and mayors aren't likely to have to deal with issues of macroeconomics, to say nothing of human rights; if the central government is actually functioning, foreign policy is never on the table.
- Parliamentary governments based on the British Political System can have this happen to Cabinet ministers who reach the top job. Cabinet ministers' skills may focus on going in-depth into their areas of responsibility (finance, justice, the environment, etc.) and any abilities related to it. Those skills are very different from the broader strategic and political skills Prime Ministers need to get their Cabinets to work as a team, not to mention lead the party in a general election. Cabinet members who become Prime Ministers in their own right often end up failing badly, especially if their predecessor was a Tough Act to Follow.
- The Presidents of the United States have several office-holders who are held up as examples of this:
- Prior to becoming President, William Howard Taft was a decent statesman, having served as Governor General of the Philippines and performed decently. Theodore Roosevelt groomed Taft to be his successor to the Progressive Republican platform, but this proved to be a bad fit: Taft had a reputation as a bit of a ditherer, weighing all sides of an issue and fussing over minute details, all of which caused the Republican platform to stall under his presidency and would give Taft the dubious honor of being the first (and so far only) major-party candidate in history to place third in an election (a challenge by the Progressive Party led by Theodore Roosevelt, who became one of the only people to try to run for a third term because he thought Taft was doing such a bad job, stole away enough votes for both men to lose to Woodrow Wilson). Taft did get a happy end, though, as he was placed in a position where caution and weighing all sides of an issue was far more fitting: Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (ironically, the position of Chief Justice is what Taft had wanted from the beginning and he only ran for President because Teddy Roosevelt wanted him to).
- Herbert Hoover was a very competent mining magnate and philanthropist and was quite possibly the most successful ever Secretary of Commerce under Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. His humanitarian aid to Europe during World War I likely saved millions of lives and made him an international hero, allowing him to win a landslide victory in the 1928 presidential election. As president, though, he had to deal with the Great Depression and made a series of terrible decisions with agricultural policy and the globally unpopular Smoot-Hawley Tariff. He had a horrible relationship with Congress and tended to not think about the optics of his decisions. His ideology of limited government intervention in the economy, commitment to the Gold Standard, and desire to avoiding deficit spending were not at all suited for solving Depression, despite his competence in lower offices. He then lost a landslide to FDR and went back to doing what he was good at, successfully organizing efforts to alleviate the humanitarian disaster caused by World War II. But ultimately, he is generally remembered more for his failures as president then he is for any of his other life accomplishments.
- Jimmy Carter did well in the Navy and as governor of Georgia, but as president his approach faltered. He had a management strategy known as "spokes of the wheel", where he was the central hub and everyone else in the White House answered to him. However, this meant he would be handling all their responsibilities, rather than appointing capable leaders in those departments to do that work for him. Carter's governance also alienated Congressional Democrats, who were frustrated by how he micromanaged their procedures and ignored their advice and in favor of his own comparatively less effective approach. After he left the White House, he ended up having a successful career as a humanitarian and liberal activist, enough that historian Nigel Hamilton, who was critical of his presidency, said his post-presidential work made Carter "the American Gandhi".
- Jesse Ventura. He may have been fine as Mayor of Brooklyn Park (and as a soldier and pro wrestler for that matter), but being elected Governor of Minnesota put him a good deal above his level of competence. His grandstanding and lack of a filter ended up alienating him from the legislature, and his dislike of the media and general lack of a sense of humor about himself didn't earn him many friends in the press, either. Add to this an economy-damaging tax rebate and it's of no real surprise that there was little disappointment when he chose not to run for re-election.
- This trope is often cited as to why Boris Johnson was able to find success in a variety of guises but faltered as Prime Minister. His eccentric, self-deprecating personality and flexible ideology helped him as a journalist who shot to fame on Have I Got News for You, as the liberal-leaning Mayor of London, and his turn as a Eurosceptic figurehead. His victory in the 2019 General Election is generally credited to his ability to appease a sizeable chunk of Remain-preferring Conservatives within a voter coalition mainly consisting of a wide variety of different types of Leavers. In the big job however, that eccentricity turned into a liability as it made him prone to scandal and seemed out-of-touch during the COVID-19 Pandemic. His erratic behavior, while rather charming in the UK, didn't resonate abroad, with many in the European Union and Joe Biden's administration finding Johnson to be insensitive and unreasonable. His ideological flexibility meanwhile meant that the coalition he assembled during a single-issue election was no longer reliable, and left the Conservative Party vulnerable not only in the northern "Red Wall" areas that were crucial to their previous win, but also in the traditionally Conservative south west whose more socially liberal outlook became alienated by his attempts to court voters elsewhere on culture war topics. When he finally left the position, he also left the Conservatives in chaos.
- For people who remember Anthony Eden as the Prime Minister who completely botched the Suez Crisis, it's a surprise to learn that he was previously Foreign Secretary for much of the 1930s, and was viewed as a successful and skilled diplomat. More sympathetic histories of him tend to say that the role of Prime Minister wasn't suited for him rather than the other way round.
- Saddam Hussein was one of the most powerful leaders of the Ba'ath party that took control of Iraq in the early 1970s, and spent the massive sums of oil money Iraq received from rising prices on everything from infrastructure to education, health care and economic diversification. Considering the chaos that engulfed the country when his regime dissolved, his ability to keep the coalition together is no mean feat, if one achieved at significant human cost. Then he became the formal President of Iraq... and proceeded to squander almost everything he achieved by waging the almost eight-year-long Iran–Iraq War. The war ended with Iraq deep in debt, most of its infrastructure in shambles and hundreds of thousands of its people dead. It went From Bad to Worse when Hussein saw a get-rich-quick scheme in accusing Kuwait of slant-drilling into its own oil fields and demanding $10 billion for lost revenue, then invaded Kuwait and triggered The Gulf War when Kuwait refused to pay that amount, leading to further destruction and crippling economic sanctions until an American-led coalition, under the belief he had weapons of mass destruction and had been assisting al-Qaeda, finally overthrew him in 2003.
- Canadian environmentalist Steven Guilbeault faced this problem when he was elected as a Liberal in the 2019 federal election. He was appointed as Minister of Canadian Heritage, a cultural ministry far out of his expertise. This led him to infamy in English-speaking Canada as he was in charge of Bill C-10, which granted extra powers to the controversial CRTC (a federal telecommunications agency) to further regulate internet content. Guilbeault spent the rest of his first term struggling to satisfactorily communicate his portfolio to the public, with his responses evoking confusion at best and national outrage at worst. He was finally moved out of the role after the 2021 federal election and instead appointed as Minister of Environment and Climate Change, better fitting his previous expertise.
- Dilma Rousseff was a great politician behind the scenes, and once in the federal government, was a Minister of Energy who helped a country that right was on the brink of an energy crisis, and a Chief of Staff who kept a faultering government afloat while starting a high-spending program for infrastructure. This caused her party to pick her as the one who would keep them in the presidency, and so she became President of Brazil. There her flaws were made clear, as a public person with an infamous tendency to derail her speech into Meaningless Meaningful Words, and a stateswoman who saw many of her ministries be hit by corruption scandals and a more hands-on developmentalist plan leading to an economic crisis. Rousseff barely managed to get a second mandate, which started with pulling unpopular economic decisions that were held off until after the re-election was guaranteed, followed by the then president of the Chamber of Deputies reacted to a process that was threatening to remove him by opening an impeachment trial on Rousseff, ensuring that by the following year, both were out of the office.
Other
- The effect has actually been studied by economists; it can be seen as a result of "reversion to the mean", where performance at one job isn't correlated with performance at a higher-up position, and so by luck of the draw everyone gets a job they're bad at eventually. A combination of physicists and sociologists even ran some simulations and found a strategy to overcome it: promote people at random. Or, promote at random either the worst or best employee at the old rank.
- The Costa Concordia disaster of January 13th, 2012—in which the 290-meter-long cruise ship struck an underwater rock formation, capsized, and partially sank—happened in part because the ship's captain, Francesco Schettino, was promoted to that position almost directly from a career path with Costa that had been otherwise almost entirely focused on security work (he had been a chief security officer before the horizontal promotion to captain, with only a little bit of experience as a navigational officer before then), which left him with almost none of the skills or competence needed to adequately command a ship. Indeed, according to some reports, the Concordia was simply the last and most unfortunate of three cruise ships under his command to be damaged during a regular cruise because he had little idea what he was doing, to say nothing of the several other poor decisions that made the trip a disaster waiting to happen (chief among them his choice, among a crew of people who were expected to speak English and/or Italian, to pick an untrained Indonesian helmsman who barely spoke either and misinterpreted steering orders on two key occasions which actually caused the crash). Much of his conduct during the disaster also proved that he didn't have the character required of a captain either: he spent much of it in denial that anything had gone wrong; immediately headed for a lifeboat as soon as the rest of the crew decided to tell people to abandon ship (for which he changed out of his uniform so no one would recognize him); actively tried to avoid doing anything more helpful once his superiors caught wind of what was going on; and then finally told the news that he was the last off the ship, which ultimately resulted in the rest of the bridge crew taking reduced sentencesnote in return for testifying against Schettino to increase his sentence.
- Academia is prone to this. An excellent researcher may be eventually given a job as a lecturer, professor, or other faculty, with students of their own. But while they may be brilliant in their field or an otherwise great thinker or experimentalist... in unfortunately many cases they tend to be absolutely woeful at teaching or supervising doctoral students or managing a research group. In any other industry, someone like that would never have been promoted into such a management position. This unfortunately ends up being detrimental to all concerned.
- This is a common situation that arises with talented home chefs that decide to give opening a restaurant a try. The skills and instincts that make a great home cook (being able to cook to your own tastes, the ability to simply buy the exact ingredients you need for each meal, the ability to allow for hours of preparation and cooking time, the fact that you don't need to manage the finances/admin of a business) does not translate well into a commercial setting.
- Former French Formula 1 driver and four times world champion Alain Prost decided to run his own team by purchasing Ligier (a mid-field French team with occasional podiums) at the end of the 1996 season, and renaming it Prost Grand Prix. The 1997 was a good season, but the car and the structure were still those of Ligier, and the real start was in 1998. Alain Prost set that the intention of his team was "to win the World Championship as quickly as possible" and saying that the former world champion Damon Hill had made a mistake in not signing for him. The team was well-financed through a number of big sponsorship parties and was powered by the French engine manufacturer Peugeot, setting high expectations. However, in the following years the team struggled to competitiveness, afflicted by lack of performance, unreliability, and mismanagement. The 2000 season saw the team failing to score a single point and losing many of its sponsorships and key technicians. At the end of the 2001 season, Prost GP bankrupted. Alain Prost later admitted that financial management was the biggest problem, with less employees than other teams but paying them much more for less duties. He also invested a lot of sponsorship money in the construction of the new team headquarters. Coupled with that, there were high-profile slanging matches and infighting between Prost and key figures. Lastly, he couldn't stand the pressure from the national press, nor the shark attitude required to swim in F1 with verbal deals changing at the moment of signing or people trying to overcome others rather than cooperate.
