Success Quote by Scott Adams

A wry inversion of cause and effect, the line suggests a workplace where failure is not punished but converted into upward mobility. It skewers the corporate habit of handling incompetence by moving it out of the way rather than rooting it out. The joke lands because it resembles reality: organizations often promote the wrong people for the wrong reasons, and success can paradoxically tether high performers to their current roles while mistakes confer visibility, narrative control, and a clean exit from hands-on work.

Scott Adams, through Dilbert, popularized the idea that the least effective are shuttled into management to minimize damage. The quip echoes both that Dilbert Principle and the Peter Principle, which holds that employees rise to their level of incompetence. Promotion becomes a face-saving maneuver. Instead of confronting failure, a manager reframes it as leadership potential, rewards boldness over results, or quietly removes a problem from a critical function by relocating it upward. A spectacular failure can even become a credential, proving the person has operated at scale, managed crises, and learned lessons that can be spun for the next role.

Bureaucratic incentives help the punchline stick. Metrics often privilege optics over impact; political capital can outweigh competence; loyalty is easier to measure than insight. Meanwhile, top individual contributors are indispensable and thus kept put, handed more responsibility without the authority or title. Over time, such patterns breed cynicism, erode accountability, and misallocate talent, as people infer that outcomes matter less than theater.

The line is satire, not an iron law, but it functions as a warning label on organizational design. When systems reward appearance, avoid hard conversations, and confuse decisiveness with wisdom, failing upward becomes thinkable. Healthy cultures reverse the logic by aligning promotions with demonstrated value, not with the need to hide mistakes.