The original Peter Principle made perfect sense for the industrial age: "In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence." In other words, organizations keep promoting people up the organization until the people they promote reach a job where they are now incompetent. Competence compounded until it turns into widespread incompentence.
Industrial organizations are built on competence, and the Peter Principle describes their undoing.
Consider a corollary, one for our times:
"To be promoted beyond your level of confidence."
Too often, the person who wrecks our work is us.
In every modern organization with upward mobility, good people are promoted until they get to the point where they lose their nerve.
You can check out the original Peter Principle here.
November 11, 2014
We have the privilege about being picky in who we expect/hope/count on/need to pick us.
Pity the foolish 8-year-old boy who gives a kid just a year older the power to make his day. In that moment, being picked for the kickball team is the most important thing in the world, and his dreams are in the hands of a kid with a demonstrated history of poor judgment. If you were walking by the playground and he yelled, "Hey Mister! Wanna be on our team?" it would (I hope) mean little to you. You're no longer willing to be judged by a kid who can't even ride a bike.
But what if your organization or your brand or your self esteem has chosen a chooser you can't rely on, or one you're not qualified to expect to have come through? If you say, "we need 100 of the top CIOs at the biggest companies in this region to choose our technology," you've made it clear who the choosers are. But if this group is swayed by bribes (which you won't pay) or local salespeople (which you don't have), you have a disconnect.
Or what if you "need" to be picked by the anonymous crowds on social networks, or picked by the apparently powerful editor or the bouncer at the club?
A huge swath of human unhappiness is generated by selecting someone to pick you, only to have that person abuse the power, let you down or otherwise seduce you into pursuing something that's not going to happen. Unchoose those people as choosers.
The person or organization you're seeking to be chosen by: Do they have a good track record? Do they choose wisely? Coherently? Reliably? Do they abuse their power, seducing you into acting against your interests? Do they make you miserable? Do they have good taste?
Do you have the resources and reputation necessary to be picked by someone like the person you're needing to be chosen by?
If you've signed up to be approved by, selected by, promoted by or otherwise chosen by someone who's not going to respond to your efforts, it's not a smart choice.
And one last thing: The ultimate privilege is to pick ourselves. To decide that the most important person to be chosen by is ourself.
If you pick yourself as the chooser, if you give yourself the power to say 'go', I hope you'll respect how much power you have, and not waste it.
November 10, 2014
In the magical abundancy-based, post-industrial world, it's tempting to look at the massive web companies that connect us as benevolent overlords, institutions that want what we want.
But then they go public.
Here's a Wall Street analyst with Needham & Company speaking her truth, about Facebook:
“Wall Street cares about the business model. We care less about changing the world.”
The reality of being a senior executive at a fast-growing public internet company is that you're surrounded by thousands (or tens of thousands) of people who make millions of dollars every single time the stock price goes up a dollar.
And that's where the seeds of demise are sown.
Say whatever you want to say, the people around you are all paying attention to the stock price, and Wall Street is driving you to mediocrity, to breaking your promises, to interrupting, shaving corners, and most of all, getting stuck.
Wall Street thinks it wants industrial-style reliable incremental growth, the stuff they got accustomed to getting from General Electric, General Mills and General Dynamic. But in fact, what they invested in this time is changing the world.
The world is going to change with or without this public company. It's bumpy for us along the way, though, because we trusted the companies that are now owned by people who want something else.
November 9, 2014
Is there an alternative to one step in front of the other, barely getting by, slogging it out? Is the only way to do good work to be a zombie (until you get to the end)?
How about, "how fast will this thing go?" Not because you want to get there faster, but merely because you want to find out what it can do.
The guys who delight in designing cars aren't worried so much about getting from point A to point B. Social media heroes like Gary Vee can't point to a direct ROI for everything they do. The famous chef probably isn't using those knives merely because they help her cut the carrots…
Taking delight in the journey takes confidence. It pushes the envelope of design. And it's fun.
November 8, 2014
…is dwarfed by the huge cost of not trying.
This is news, a state of affairs due to the significant value of connection, to the power of ideas that spread and to the low cost of production.
Delighting a few with an idea worth spreading is more valuable than ever before.
November 7, 2014
We don't usually use that cliche, but it's true.
Trading in your standards in order to gain short-term attention or profit isn't as easy as it looks. Once-great media brands that now traffic in cheesecake and quick clicks didn't get there by mistake. Respected brands that rushed to deliver low price at all costs had to figure out which corners to cut, and fooled themselves into thinking they could get away with it forever.
As the bottom gets more and more crowded, it's harder than ever to be more short-sighted than everyone else. If you're going to need to work that hard at it, might as well put the effort into racing to the top instead…
November 6, 2014
When you build a building, it stays around for a long time.
When you invest and staff a factory, it's something significant, and it lasts.
When Heinz gets shelf space at the supermarket, the status quo is powerful and that shelf space might last a generation or two.
Today, the smart money is investing in digital assets, and legions of entrepreneurs are trying to build long-term value online, where it just seems so easy. 100,000 downloads of your new app, or a quick rise to #1 for your new ebook or a million 'hits' to a new website.
Easy come, easy go.
The digital asset that matters is trust. Awareness first, then interaction, and maybe a habit, but all three mean nothing if they don't lead to permission and trust. The privilege of connection.
Everything else is slippery.
November 5, 2014
The people you hire will do creative work despite your management style, sometimes.
Or they might do it in spite of your approach, rarely.
But the most likely way to get the work you seek is to earn it, to have people bring their best ideas forward because of the leadership and guts you bring to the table.
You can't demand creativity, not for long. You can earn it though.
November 4, 2014
… but that doesn't mean I'm unable to choose well made and comfortable shoes.
You might not be a writer, but that doesn't mean you can't read.
You might not be a chef, but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy your dinner.
You might not be a scientist, but that doesn't mean you're unable to understand the scientific method and accept a well-discussed thesis.
You might not be a programmer, but that doesn't mean you can't use Excel or the internet.
You might not be the boss, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't care about what happens next.
And you might not be a political scientist, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't vote.
Vote tomorrow. Even if it's for a person who is sure to lose (especially if it's for a person who is sure to lose). If non-voters started voting for outliers who live their morals, our democracy would change completely in less than a decade.
November 3, 2014
We're hiring, but not people like you.
I'm looking for a doctor, but of course, not someone like you.
We're putting together a study group, but we won't be able to include people like you.
Redlining is an efficient short-term selection strategy. At least that's what we tell ourselves. So the bank won't loan to people in that neighborhood or people with this cultural background, because, hey, we can't loan to everyone and it's easier to just draw a red line around the places not worth our time…
The challenge with redlining, beyond the fact that it's morally repugnant, is that it doesn't work. There's a difference between "people like you" and "you." You, the human being, the person with a track record and a great attitude and a skillset deserve consideration for those things, for your psychographics, not your demographics.
When there's not so much data, we often resort to crude measures of where you live or what you look like or what your name is to decide how to judge. But the same transparency that the net is giving to marketers of all sorts means that the banks and the universities and the hiring managers ought to be able to get beyond the, "like you" bias and head straight for "you."
Because 'you' is undervalued and undernoticed.
When we say, "I don't work with people like you, I won't consider supporting someone like you, I can't invest in someone like you," we've just eliminated value, wasted an opportunity and stripped away not just someone else's dignity, but our own.
What have you done? What do you know? Where are you going? Those are a great place to start, to choose people because of what they've chosen, not where they started. Not because this will always tell us what someone is capable of (too many people don't have the head start they deserve) but because it is demonstrably more useful than the crude, expensive, fear-based shortcuts we're using far too often.
In a society where it's easier than ever to see "you," we can't help but benefit when we become anti-racist, pro-feminist, in favor of equal opportunity and focused (even obsessed) on maximizing the opportunity everyone gets, early and often.
November 2, 2014
