Raymond Hull & Laurence J. Peter
Metro Theatre, 1370 S.W. Marine Dr.
"In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence."
From The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong
One of the most famous non-fiction books written in British Columbia, The Peter Principle (1969), was co-authored by Raymond Hull and Laurence J. Peter after the pair met as strangers while attending an amateur production at the Metro Theatre. In the lobby, during intermission, Hull mentioned the production was a failure. Laurence J. Peter, an Education professor at UBC, suggested to Hull that people invariably rise to their level of incompetence. In their international bestseller that resulted, The Peter Principle, Peter described his theme as “hierarchiology,” a term now commonly used when analyzing systems in human society. Hull described the content as, “the tragi-comic truth about incompetence, its causes and its cure.” Dr. Laurence J. Peter, who was born in Vancouver and worked for the Vancouver school system from 1941 to 1965, left B.C. and worked in the Education faculty of the University of Southern California. He wrote 11 more books and died in 1990. Raymond Hull was a writer and also an actor and playwright. He died in 1985, bequeathing most of his royalties from six plays and 18 books to the Canadian Authors Association, and most of the rest of his estate, approximately $100,000, was given to the Vancouver Public Library.
