Hidden Talents, Winning Teams (part 4)
Introducing the "Reverse Peter Principle"
The 2024 NBA playoffs were the best of times for Jaylen Brown. He scored 29 points per game in the conference finals and 21 points per game in the finals, leading his team to the first NBA Championship of his career, and taking home the MVP award for both series. So when a spot opened up on the US Olympic team through injury, he was the natural choice. Instead, the spot went to his teammate, Derrick White.
Now, making the US men’s basketball Olympic team is no easy feat. Of the roughly half a million high school boys basketball players in the United States, less than 1% will earn a spot on an NCAA Division I team. Just 1% of that group will be drafted into NBA. Of the 350 or so American basketball players in the NBA, 12 make the Olympic team (3.5%). These players are the best of the best of the best of the best.
Derrick White was a good high school player—he averaged 17 points a game for a small high school in suburban Denver—but he was not one of the 1% to earn a Division I scholarship. Instead, he attended Division II University of Colorado Colorado Springs, where he played for three years before finally earning his Division I scholarship at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Again, he was very good, averaging 18 points per game and earning conference All-Defense honors. He was selected 29th overall in the 2017 NBA Draft—the second to last pick of the first round. Late first round picks generally find it difficult to hang on in the NBA. They play an average of 6 years, scoring 6.3 points per game.
Derrick White was more successful than that. After 5 solid if unspectacular years with the San Antonio Spurs, he was traded to the Boston Celtics in 2022. While never a star, he became an elite role player, earning second-team all-defensive honors in 2023 and 2024. He was a key contributor to the team that won the championship in 2024, though he was the least heralded of his team’s five starters, and the only one never to have played on an All-Star team.
So it was certainly a surprise when White was selected to the Olympic team over Jaylen Brown. But once in Paris, White thrived. In fact, he played in more games and earned more total minutes than his other superstar NBA teammate, Jayson Tatum.
In high school basketball, there were thousands of players better than Derrick White. In college, hundreds were better. In the NBA, dozens are better. And in the Olympics, only a handful of players are better.
Has Derrick White been improving? Sure. But there is a larger trend going on here: every time he moves up to a higher level of basketball, he becomes more effective relative to his peers. Players who outperform him at lower levels underperform him at higher levels.
We can call this the “Reverse Peter Principle.” You are familiar with the Peter Principle, a concept introduced by Laurence J. Peter in his 1969 book titled The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong. This principle observes that employees are often promoted based on their performance in their current roles until they reach a position where they are no longer competent, effectively resulting in them “rising to the level of their incompetence”.
The ”Reverse Peter Principle” refers to the opposite: when people, like Derrick White, rise up the ranks and somehow get better in more challenging roles, either absolutely or relative to their peers.
How does this happen? What does it mean for business leaders?
We’ll discuss that next week.
Thanks,
The Impactful Executive Team
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