Solitude and Leadership was delivered by William Deresiewicz to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point in October 2009 and originally published in The American Scholar.
This is known as the Peter principle, a management concept developed by Laurence J. Peter in the late ’60s that posits that a person who’s good at their job in a hierarchical organization will invariably be promoted to a position that requires different skills, until they’re eventually promoted to something they can’t do, at which point they’ve reached their “maximum incompetence.”