Tuesday, January 12, 2016
Friday, January 1, 2016
5 Tips for Setting Your Optimum Price
Image credit:
Shutterstock
Pricing products or services is one of the most important decisions entrepreneurs make for their businesses. And, unfortunately, getting this right can be tricky. But paying attention to the five items below will help you to navigate these treacherous waters more smoothly.
1. Perceived value of your offering
What does your customer base perceive to be the value of your offering? This will establish the maximum price you can charge because a rational person will not pay more for something than the value he or she perceives.
Remember that it's perceived value that matters, not actual value. If the actual value of your offering exceeds perceived value, you may be able to change perception with a well-crafted marketing communication program. However, until the perception is changed, that factor will cap what you can charge.
2. Competitors' prices
If you’re selling a commodity (e.g., gas offered by two stations next door to each other), you won’t be able to charge meaningfully more than the competition. In this example, a difference in price of only a few pennies per gallon will shift significant volume.
But if your product or service is differentiated from your competition's in a way that at least some portion of the market finds desirable, you may be able to charge a premium vis à vis your competitors' price. One reason companies spend so much on marketing is to make sure that customers understand the things that differentiate their offering. This enables them to price much more closely to the product's or service's full value.
3. Cost structure
Focus first on variable costs. These are costs that go up as revenue increases (e.g., raw material, direct labor). Except in the case of loss leaders, the variable cost sets the floor for price. If you price below variable cost, you will lose money on every unit sold, and you can’t make that up in volume. Price minus variable cost is variable contribution (i.e., the amount of money you make on each unit you sell).
Next, focus on fixed costs. These costs remain constant as revenue grows (e.g., rent, utilities and overhead, such as accounting). Admittedly, all costs are variable with a large enough increase in revenue, but we’re talking about more modest changes. Fixed cost divided by variable contribution equals the number of units you have to sell to reach the break-even point (if you run a service business, think of units sold as hours billed).
If it isn’t reasonable for you to believe that you can sell this number of units, you’ll need to increase your price to survive.
4. Profit targets
Add your profit requirement (or target) to fixed cost and divide variable contribution to calculate the number of units you need to sell to achieve your profit objective. If it is reasonable to believe that you can achieve this number of units at the price you are planning to charge, great. If not, you may need to adjust your price either up or down.
Profit = Unit Volume X (Price – Variable Cost) – Fixed Cost
Economic theory says that as price goes up, volume will decrease. Over time, you can make adjustments to price and observe the impact on profit. If you lower price a bit, does your volume go up enough to result in a profit increase? Alternatively, if you raise price, can you maintain enough volume to increase profit? Continue to adjust your price until you find the point at which the profit is maximized.
5. Competitive response
Remember, you don’t make pricing decisions in a vacuum. Competitors will respond. So, reducing price may drive increased profit for a short time. However, if competitors match your price reduction, the result may be reduced profit for the entire industry. When making pricing decisions, be sure to factor in what you think your competitors will do.
Pricing your product or service can be tricky, but paying attention to these important factors can make the difference between a profit and a loss.
Wednesday, December 30, 2015
3 Ways Offering Something for Free Can Actually Make You Lots of Money
Image credit:
Shutterstock
I’ve always viewed zero as a special number. You can add as many zeros as you want in a sequence, and the end result is still zero. You can multiply any number by zero and you get zero. If you divide a number by zero, you get a spirited debate among mathematicians.
The concept of zero has marveled mathematicians and philosophers alike, but businesses can also take something away from its unique properties. That’s because something magical happens when a price falls to zero -- all of a sudden, demand rises to infinity.
For software companies and startups that offer their services over the Internet, zero or “free” should be a central consideration in your business model. It was for me when I founded Wattpad, and it continues to be one of the core reasons we remain so successful today. Here are a few things to zero in on when examining this model.
1. Rapid user adoption
When Microsoft announced in August that its new edition of Windows 10 had hit 75 million downloads in its first month, many people reacted with surprise. After all, it took Microsoft six months to hit 100 million downloads for its previous release of Windows 8.
What was so different this time? What made this launch so special? The answer lies in the number zero.
By offering Windows 10 for free, Microsoft was able to capitalize on a wider audience of users and seed early interest for its operating system with developers. Similarly, when businesses offer something for free, they can speed up customer acquisition and build a user base much more rapidly.
Remember that there are many factors that prevent people from adopting a product or service -- price being one of them. By offering something for free, you completely eliminate a common question consumers have when deciding to try a new product -- “Should I pay for this?”
2. Organic growth
Besides eliminating friction, eliminating price also removes barriers to adoption based on socio-economic grounds, which in turn sets the stage for organic growth. My company, Wattpad, is a prime example of this.
When we first launched, our goal was to connect the billions of people who seek entertainment and escape through stories. In many parts of the world, access to reading material is limited, so we wanted to create an environment where people could connect, read and write stories, regardless of their background. Offering services for free was central in achieving this.
As the Internet becomes more ubiquitous and smartphone technology decreases in cost, the environment for Wattpad to flourish grows, because we offer our services at price point that compels people to download. We now have over 40 million users visiting our site every month and more than 150 million stories available in over 50 languages.
Even more impressive than this, our users -- because they come from such diverse backgrounds -- have been able to find their unique voice and enact change on our platform. Take for example Wattpad user Tahlie Purvis, a 16-year-old from Canada who is mobilizing writers to depict characters with imperfect body types. The movement, called #FreeYourBody, would not have been possible if our platform weren’t openly available to young adults to download. Because we’re free, we have a much broader user base that can organically shape the direction of our business.
3. Other ways to generate revenue
Offering services for free , of course, doesn’t make sense for every business, but for those operating in software or on the Internet, “free” is a very real consideration that should be made. After all, there are as many as 60,000 apps added to Apple’s App Store every month. Price point could very well be the key differentiator between you and a competitor.
That said, it’s crucial for startups to consider ways they can generate revenue if they do choose to offer services for free. One option is advertising.
Chinese ecommerce site Alibaba is known for not charging a transaction or listing fee for their marketplace items and handles billions in transactions. How do they make money? The answer is that revenue comes from Taobao, their consumer-facing shopping website, and 100 percent of it comes from native ads.
Another option startups can consider is the upgrade path, where a business attracts users with free baseline services but offer advanced access or additional perks for a price. This option is popular among music streaming sites, like Pandora or Spotify. Even YouTube recently unveiled a new paid service (YouTube Red) which would give users an ad-free experience and exclusive access to new content. Interestingly, each of these services provides a free option to attract new users, and let’s not forget that YouTube’s recent offering comes years after reaching a defensible scale.
Whatever method you choose to make money, make sure that it doesn’t alienate customers. While offering free services can certainly draw people in, inundating them with pop-ups or requests for upgraded service can keep them from returning to your site.
So to sum up -- offering free services allows startups to differentiate themselves from competitors, rapidly build a user base and create a community that can grow organically. In a world where raising revenue often dictates every decision, sometimes "thinking zero” can actually lead businesses to make millions.
Contributor
Co-founder and CEO of Wattpad
Tuesday, November 24, 2015
The Truth About KPIs and Other Corporate Bullsh*t
Liz Ryan
CEO and Founder, Human Workplace
If
you don't have KPIs to hit on the job, you can say a little prayer of
thanks in your head right now. KPIs are Key Performance Indicators. They
are yardsticks. They are idiotic, but weenie organizations love them.
Measuring things is a lousy manager's favorite pastime!
In our quest to make business and work as mechanical and inhuman as possible over the past hundred years, every position in many large organizations has been sliced and diced into tiny pieces so that each piece can be measured and evaluated against a chart posted on the wall.
Some employers use software that tracks their employees' every keystroke and tracks the length of every phone call.
Other organizations track the number of minutes their teammates spend in the restroom. The more fear-based an organization's culture is, the more things they measure and count.
We treat people at work like production machines, which is not only unethical but stupid, too.
People are capable of much more than machines are, because people synthesize what they learn and come up with ideas every day if they are plugged into their personal power source at work.
They transcend their desk and their job description, especially when a group of people is energized around the same mission.
The only catch is that if people are constantly poked and prodded and measured and yammered at, they stop winning. They stop collaborating. They stop caring.
The goose stops laying the golden eggs.
Every single living person knows this about people, but at work we pretend it's not true. In real life, we know that people are at their best when they're excited about what they're doing. At work we stick our fingers in our ears and say "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it!" like blithering idiots.
When people are jointly committed to a big goal that excites them, they are unstoppable. That's why it is stupid to shackle and burden employees by measuring their every move so that nearly all of their focus goes to reaching their daily and weekly goals. Forget about your mission, then!
How does our obsession with individual performance measurements help a customer or help the world? KPIs spring completely from fear. They have no business purpose at all except to assuage the fear of higher-ups who don't trust themselves enough to trust other people.
When employees are treated like machines whose only value is to answer forty customer calls a day and get each caller off the phone within three minutes, they will never give a fig about your company's success. How can you blame them?
They will never give you anything better than grudging compliance with the rules and standards. Who ever got excited about hitting someone else's yardsticks -- goals that were shoved down his or her throat?
What happens in most organizations when you hit your goals for a quarter or for the year? When you hit your goals, they get bigger for the next reporting period and you don't get a "Great job!" or a pay raise to acknowledge your success.
Work is broken and it is time for us to tell the truth about that. We have foolishly tried to apply junk science to work, and KPIs and the cult of measurement in general are testaments to that foolishness.
What makes an organization successful? The effort of its team on behalf of the organization's mission and their own missions is the obvious answer.
That momentum - what we call Team Mojo - is not hard to build. It only takes trusting the people you hired, meaning that you have to trust yourself first.
You have to talk about fear and trust at work to begin to build the Team Mojo level. You have to be honest about things that are going well and things that aren't. You have to name the elephant in the room and stop pretending that you can make your organization successful by hitting little numbers in little cells in spreadsheets.
What puts those numbers in those cells, after all? Conversations do. Trust puts the numbers in the cells. That's where your leadership energy should go - toward building the trust level at work, and getting rid of pointless yardsticks that impede the energy flow.
Sadly many leaders can't trust themselves to lead, so they install layers upon layers of rules and measurements, instead.
We lead stupidly and then we're surprised when survey after survey tells us that employees don't give a dang about their employers' goals. What person with three functioning brain cells would? We have made it impossible for our employees to care.
We've told them that if they cared more than they do about their work, they'd be squandering their flame and wasting their effort, because we don't care about them beyond their production capacity.
The organizations that will win both in the talent marketplace and in the marketplace for their services or products are the ones who see the connection between passion and performance.
They'll get rid of KPIs and other bureaucratic systems and they'll talk about the mission and the roadblocks in their way to reaching it.
They'll talk about those things every day, and they'll be human with one another at work every day, too. It's very easy to begin. Anyone can start the chain reaction, and the more people who do, the better!
There is a lot of bullsh*t and wasted effort in corporate and institutional everywhere but the good news is that every organization gets to choose for itself how to navigate in this new-millennium workplace. Every individual gets to choose how much of him- or herself to bring to work.
You get to be as human or machine-like as you want to be. Working people get to choose where to invest their precious talents, time and flame.
We are stepping out of the old religion of data and measurement as keys to the kingdom of success.
Now we know that there is a key, but it's connected to human energy, about as distant a topic as you could find from yardsticks and KPIs. We can focus on human energy the same way we have traditionally focused on numbers, and we must. We can talk about the trust level and the Team Mojo on our teams.
Those things won't show up on a spreadsheet until it's too late to fix whatever has gone wrong. No Employee Engagement survey is going to help an organization that doesn't know how its team members are doing without taking a survey.
Are you brave enough to get step out of the 19th-century, mechanical-business frame and into the Human Workplace?
Everyone gets the same invitation, from the CEO's office to the loading dock. Now is a great time to take a step toward bringing yourself to work. Your flame will grow brighter every time you do!
In our quest to make business and work as mechanical and inhuman as possible over the past hundred years, every position in many large organizations has been sliced and diced into tiny pieces so that each piece can be measured and evaluated against a chart posted on the wall.
Some employers use software that tracks their employees' every keystroke and tracks the length of every phone call.
Other organizations track the number of minutes their teammates spend in the restroom. The more fear-based an organization's culture is, the more things they measure and count.
We treat people at work like production machines, which is not only unethical but stupid, too.
People are capable of much more than machines are, because people synthesize what they learn and come up with ideas every day if they are plugged into their personal power source at work.
They transcend their desk and their job description, especially when a group of people is energized around the same mission.
The only catch is that if people are constantly poked and prodded and measured and yammered at, they stop winning. They stop collaborating. They stop caring.
The goose stops laying the golden eggs.
Every single living person knows this about people, but at work we pretend it's not true. In real life, we know that people are at their best when they're excited about what they're doing. At work we stick our fingers in our ears and say "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it!" like blithering idiots.
When people are jointly committed to a big goal that excites them, they are unstoppable. That's why it is stupid to shackle and burden employees by measuring their every move so that nearly all of their focus goes to reaching their daily and weekly goals. Forget about your mission, then!
How does our obsession with individual performance measurements help a customer or help the world? KPIs spring completely from fear. They have no business purpose at all except to assuage the fear of higher-ups who don't trust themselves enough to trust other people.
When employees are treated like machines whose only value is to answer forty customer calls a day and get each caller off the phone within three minutes, they will never give a fig about your company's success. How can you blame them?
They will never give you anything better than grudging compliance with the rules and standards. Who ever got excited about hitting someone else's yardsticks -- goals that were shoved down his or her throat?
What happens in most organizations when you hit your goals for a quarter or for the year? When you hit your goals, they get bigger for the next reporting period and you don't get a "Great job!" or a pay raise to acknowledge your success.
Work is broken and it is time for us to tell the truth about that. We have foolishly tried to apply junk science to work, and KPIs and the cult of measurement in general are testaments to that foolishness.
What makes an organization successful? The effort of its team on behalf of the organization's mission and their own missions is the obvious answer.
That momentum - what we call Team Mojo - is not hard to build. It only takes trusting the people you hired, meaning that you have to trust yourself first.
You have to talk about fear and trust at work to begin to build the Team Mojo level. You have to be honest about things that are going well and things that aren't. You have to name the elephant in the room and stop pretending that you can make your organization successful by hitting little numbers in little cells in spreadsheets.
What puts those numbers in those cells, after all? Conversations do. Trust puts the numbers in the cells. That's where your leadership energy should go - toward building the trust level at work, and getting rid of pointless yardsticks that impede the energy flow.
Sadly many leaders can't trust themselves to lead, so they install layers upon layers of rules and measurements, instead.
We lead stupidly and then we're surprised when survey after survey tells us that employees don't give a dang about their employers' goals. What person with three functioning brain cells would? We have made it impossible for our employees to care.
We've told them that if they cared more than they do about their work, they'd be squandering their flame and wasting their effort, because we don't care about them beyond their production capacity.
The organizations that will win both in the talent marketplace and in the marketplace for their services or products are the ones who see the connection between passion and performance.
They'll get rid of KPIs and other bureaucratic systems and they'll talk about the mission and the roadblocks in their way to reaching it.
They'll talk about those things every day, and they'll be human with one another at work every day, too. It's very easy to begin. Anyone can start the chain reaction, and the more people who do, the better!
There is a lot of bullsh*t and wasted effort in corporate and institutional everywhere but the good news is that every organization gets to choose for itself how to navigate in this new-millennium workplace. Every individual gets to choose how much of him- or herself to bring to work.
You get to be as human or machine-like as you want to be. Working people get to choose where to invest their precious talents, time and flame.
We are stepping out of the old religion of data and measurement as keys to the kingdom of success.
Now we know that there is a key, but it's connected to human energy, about as distant a topic as you could find from yardsticks and KPIs. We can focus on human energy the same way we have traditionally focused on numbers, and we must. We can talk about the trust level and the Team Mojo on our teams.
Those things won't show up on a spreadsheet until it's too late to fix whatever has gone wrong. No Employee Engagement survey is going to help an organization that doesn't know how its team members are doing without taking a survey.
Are you brave enough to get step out of the 19th-century, mechanical-business frame and into the Human Workplace?
Everyone gets the same invitation, from the CEO's office to the loading dock. Now is a great time to take a step toward bringing yourself to work. Your flame will grow brighter every time you do!
Friday, November 20, 2015
Promoted to failure?-The curious effect of Peter Principle
Sometimes during early 2000, while scaling up our operations, I found
a unique phenomenon affecting our organisation. People who were proven
performers were moved up & given additional responsibilities with
larger teams. I found that most of those so promoted, started showing
signs of failing in their performances, either at a personal level or as
managers.
Despite my best efforts at mentoring & guiding my top team, this phenomenon was becoming something of a a ritual. The results were extremely surprising & foxing with no credible answer. Around 2007 I came across an article on Peter Principle & I found the observation very intriguing & interesting. I read a lot on it & while there had been no research done to prove the truth behind the principle, the observation made by Dr. Laurence J. Peter & Raymond Hull and published in their book "The Peter Principle" in 1968, was actually at work within my company.
Peter Principle is an observation that in an organizational hierarchy, every employee will rise or get promoted to his or her level of incompetence. It is based on the notion that employees will get promoted as long as they are competent, but at some point will fail to get promoted beyond a certain job because it has become too challenging for them. Employees rise to their level of incompetence and stay there. Over time, every position in the hierarchy will be filled by someone who is not competent enough to carry out his or her new duties.
Dr Peter clarified that it was not necessarily incompetence at the new position of the employee. Every new role requires new competencies & skills, which an otherwise competent employee may not possess, hence the failure. He succulently sums up his observation as “the cream rises until it sours”.
While Peter Principle remains a concept in management theory & there has been no research done to support this observation, I have personally seen it at work within my own & many client organisations with repeated frequency. Managers promoted sequentially over a period of time, do tend to rise to their “level of incompetence” till promotions are no longer possible.
This principle is fraught with a catch-22 situation. Performers in any organisation expect growth, both in terms of role & responsibilities, else stagnation followed by churn sets in. With each subsequent promotion an employee heads closer to his level of incompetence. Promotion that leads to a slide in performance has a collateral damage – loss of a previous good performer.
Not everyone agrees with this principle though. Leigh Steere, co-owner, Managing People Better LLC says "I personally do not believe in the Peter Principle. The field of neurolinguistic programming says that any behaviour/skill can be learned. In other words, if a person does not already know how to do something, he/she can be taught”.
On the other hand, Ric Morgan, professional speaker and author of “The Keys: The Textbook to a Successful Life” is a firm believer. "This problem is so diverse and prevalent I have even seen examples of the founder of the company being a leading example of the Peter Principle. I know that sounds crazy, but this is exactly what happens despite the fact that they had two things going for them: an idea that was just too good to fail, and the ability to hire very competent people to make it all work.
"I have even, as crazy as this sounds, found this in people who are running or trying to start one-man shops. In this day and age of entrepreneurship, everyone believes they can start a business and make it succeed because they 'have the best idea that will make them overnight millionaires.' Wrong! It's hard to look into someone's eyes and tell them they are too incompetent to do what they have set out to do, even if they have been doing something similar in another place, where they had actually reached the level of incompetence espoused by Dr. Laurence. As a business consultant, the minute I find the people who are living examples of the Peter Principle is the minute I find the problems in the company”.
There are those who take the mid-path. Marcia Reynolds, PsyD, author of 'Wander Woman: How High-Achieving Women Find Contentment and Direction' says "I have been a corporate trainer for 30 years. I don't believe you can really measure the truth of the Peter Principle without analyzing the training the person has had for the position they have moved into, especially if it's a promotion.
"With each promotion the person has to give up some of the things they have done before and take on new tasks, responsibilities and perspectives (including work values). What they did before will not ensure their success in the present. However, if the person doesn't get good mentoring, training and a manager who can support the shift, they are not given the tools to succeed. They could be competent if given the chance."
My personal experience is that training & mentoring cannot be sustained over years & subsequent promotions. With experience & age, mindsets & resistance to learning sets in & I have seen some of the senior-most & finest professionals being rendered “un-trainable”. So strong has been their belief in their own strengths & past knowledge that they fail to see the looming disaster leading to the sudden end of an illustrious career. I have interacted with so many such corporate stalwarts, once brilliant but now laid-off, just because they attained their level of incompetence in their last role.
Can the Peter Principal be overcome? I believe it can be. Though there have been many articles written on this I haven’t really found any authentic answer anywhere. Looking back at my own experience I feel that the first thing to do before moving on to a new role, is to “act like the person you want to become”. What is needed is a personal transformation from who you are to what you have become or wish to become. For a start one must be willing to give up the person one is, no matter how successful, because some of the skill sets needed in a new role will be different from the ones in which the person is finding success currently. Find out the challenges, drawbacks & skill sets for a new role & start acting the way you want to be or required to be & soon enough it is possible to become the person you need to be.
The biggest challenge to this is the lethargy that most people face to get out of one’s comfort zone. It isn’t easy to stop being the person you are at a successful point of time & become another person you wish to be at another level. It can be done through self-realisation & actively seeking mentoring, which must begin with a clear motive—a serious desire to change, learn & imbibe. Unfortunately not many people remain students for life & start resisting change & that is when the slide begins when a role change takes place.
As a way of managing this curious principle within GRASSIK, I advise people looking to be promoted in the future to mentally tear up their current job role. I give them the key deliverables for success in the new role & ask them to mentally switch to the new role & live out the same under my guidance for a few months before they actually move to the enhanced role. I usually give them the option to choose the time of their promotion, at which time they are more attuned mentally to achieve a better successful transition. But problems always remain, for managers are never perfect. If they were, management principles would not exist.
About the Author:
Rajeev is the Founder Director of Grassik search Pvt Ltd, one of the country’s finest & oldest search firms, which he established in 1993. He has over 22 years of experience in executive search, executing CXO level searches across industries. Amongst the pioneers of the executive search industry, he is a respected career coach, guide & a mentor who has helped people transition careers successfully across industries & roles. An expert change & innovation driver, he has been instrumental in making GRASSIK the most relevant & successful search firm in the country today, successfully managing the fast changing client expectations & candidate aspirations.
Despite my best efforts at mentoring & guiding my top team, this phenomenon was becoming something of a a ritual. The results were extremely surprising & foxing with no credible answer. Around 2007 I came across an article on Peter Principle & I found the observation very intriguing & interesting. I read a lot on it & while there had been no research done to prove the truth behind the principle, the observation made by Dr. Laurence J. Peter & Raymond Hull and published in their book "The Peter Principle" in 1968, was actually at work within my company.
Peter Principle is an observation that in an organizational hierarchy, every employee will rise or get promoted to his or her level of incompetence. It is based on the notion that employees will get promoted as long as they are competent, but at some point will fail to get promoted beyond a certain job because it has become too challenging for them. Employees rise to their level of incompetence and stay there. Over time, every position in the hierarchy will be filled by someone who is not competent enough to carry out his or her new duties.
Dr Peter clarified that it was not necessarily incompetence at the new position of the employee. Every new role requires new competencies & skills, which an otherwise competent employee may not possess, hence the failure. He succulently sums up his observation as “the cream rises until it sours”.
While Peter Principle remains a concept in management theory & there has been no research done to support this observation, I have personally seen it at work within my own & many client organisations with repeated frequency. Managers promoted sequentially over a period of time, do tend to rise to their “level of incompetence” till promotions are no longer possible.
This principle is fraught with a catch-22 situation. Performers in any organisation expect growth, both in terms of role & responsibilities, else stagnation followed by churn sets in. With each subsequent promotion an employee heads closer to his level of incompetence. Promotion that leads to a slide in performance has a collateral damage – loss of a previous good performer.
Not everyone agrees with this principle though. Leigh Steere, co-owner, Managing People Better LLC says "I personally do not believe in the Peter Principle. The field of neurolinguistic programming says that any behaviour/skill can be learned. In other words, if a person does not already know how to do something, he/she can be taught”.
On the other hand, Ric Morgan, professional speaker and author of “The Keys: The Textbook to a Successful Life” is a firm believer. "This problem is so diverse and prevalent I have even seen examples of the founder of the company being a leading example of the Peter Principle. I know that sounds crazy, but this is exactly what happens despite the fact that they had two things going for them: an idea that was just too good to fail, and the ability to hire very competent people to make it all work.
"I have even, as crazy as this sounds, found this in people who are running or trying to start one-man shops. In this day and age of entrepreneurship, everyone believes they can start a business and make it succeed because they 'have the best idea that will make them overnight millionaires.' Wrong! It's hard to look into someone's eyes and tell them they are too incompetent to do what they have set out to do, even if they have been doing something similar in another place, where they had actually reached the level of incompetence espoused by Dr. Laurence. As a business consultant, the minute I find the people who are living examples of the Peter Principle is the minute I find the problems in the company”.
There are those who take the mid-path. Marcia Reynolds, PsyD, author of 'Wander Woman: How High-Achieving Women Find Contentment and Direction' says "I have been a corporate trainer for 30 years. I don't believe you can really measure the truth of the Peter Principle without analyzing the training the person has had for the position they have moved into, especially if it's a promotion.
"With each promotion the person has to give up some of the things they have done before and take on new tasks, responsibilities and perspectives (including work values). What they did before will not ensure their success in the present. However, if the person doesn't get good mentoring, training and a manager who can support the shift, they are not given the tools to succeed. They could be competent if given the chance."
My personal experience is that training & mentoring cannot be sustained over years & subsequent promotions. With experience & age, mindsets & resistance to learning sets in & I have seen some of the senior-most & finest professionals being rendered “un-trainable”. So strong has been their belief in their own strengths & past knowledge that they fail to see the looming disaster leading to the sudden end of an illustrious career. I have interacted with so many such corporate stalwarts, once brilliant but now laid-off, just because they attained their level of incompetence in their last role.
Can the Peter Principal be overcome? I believe it can be. Though there have been many articles written on this I haven’t really found any authentic answer anywhere. Looking back at my own experience I feel that the first thing to do before moving on to a new role, is to “act like the person you want to become”. What is needed is a personal transformation from who you are to what you have become or wish to become. For a start one must be willing to give up the person one is, no matter how successful, because some of the skill sets needed in a new role will be different from the ones in which the person is finding success currently. Find out the challenges, drawbacks & skill sets for a new role & start acting the way you want to be or required to be & soon enough it is possible to become the person you need to be.
The biggest challenge to this is the lethargy that most people face to get out of one’s comfort zone. It isn’t easy to stop being the person you are at a successful point of time & become another person you wish to be at another level. It can be done through self-realisation & actively seeking mentoring, which must begin with a clear motive—a serious desire to change, learn & imbibe. Unfortunately not many people remain students for life & start resisting change & that is when the slide begins when a role change takes place.
As a way of managing this curious principle within GRASSIK, I advise people looking to be promoted in the future to mentally tear up their current job role. I give them the key deliverables for success in the new role & ask them to mentally switch to the new role & live out the same under my guidance for a few months before they actually move to the enhanced role. I usually give them the option to choose the time of their promotion, at which time they are more attuned mentally to achieve a better successful transition. But problems always remain, for managers are never perfect. If they were, management principles would not exist.
About the Author:
Rajeev is the Founder Director of Grassik search Pvt Ltd, one of the country’s finest & oldest search firms, which he established in 1993. He has over 22 years of experience in executive search, executing CXO level searches across industries. Amongst the pioneers of the executive search industry, he is a respected career coach, guide & a mentor who has helped people transition careers successfully across industries & roles. An expert change & innovation driver, he has been instrumental in making GRASSIK the most relevant & successful search firm in the country today, successfully managing the fast changing client expectations & candidate aspirations.
Thursday, November 12, 2015
Success Can Come at Any Age. Just Look at These 6 Successful Entrepreneurs.
Image credit:
http://www.kfclibrary.com/
Here are six entrepreneurs who got their start later in life and prove that success is a possibility at any age:
1. Leo Goodwin, GEICO
GEICO, or the Government Employee’s Insurance Company, is now a well-known car insurance brand with well-known advertising figures. But before the Gecko, the Caveman or Maxwell, GEICO was the idea of Leo Goodwin. Working as an accountant in San Antonio, Texas, in the 1930’s, Goodwin realized that insurance needed an overhaul. Why weren’t companies just dealing with customers directly, saving all the money that traditionally went to brokers?In 1936, at the age of 50, Leo founded GEICO in Washington, D.C. In a departure from most businessmen of the day, he worked closely with his wife Lillian in running the company. By the end of the year, GEICO had 12 people on staff and 3,700 policies in force. Today, GEICO employs over 27,000 people and has over 14 million policyholders.
2. Harland David Sanders, Kentucky Fried Chicken
Col. Sanders did not start out as anyone’s idea of a successful businessman. He lost his father at an early age, quarreled extensively with his stepfather, and was fired from multiple jobs, even losing his job as a lawyer after a courtroom brawl with his own client. However, he was determined to never give up, and this trait led to his eventual success.While working at a service station in Corbin, Ky., Sanders gained local popularity for his delicious chicken recipe. After the Corbin station was destroyed by a fire, Sanders had the location rebuilt as a motel and 140-seat restaurant. In 1952, at the age of 62, Sanders franchised his “Kentucky Fried Chicken” for the first time. Today, KFC has over 18,800 outlets in 118 different countries and territories.
3. Robert Noyce, Intel
After earning his doctorate in physics from MIT, Robert Noyce found work as a research engineer, eventually ending up at Beckman Instruments. In 1957, he and seven others left Beckman and founded the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation. While he enjoyed some success there, he eventually left with Gordon Moore. Together, they founded Intel when Noyce was 41.Noyce was considered the visionary of the company and treated staff like family. He declined the lavish benefits that most CEOs received, and kept the company less structured and more relaxed. While at Intel, he oversaw the invention of the microprocessor, an innovation that revolutionized computer technology and forms the foundation of the machines we still use today.
4. Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn
Surely a company like LinkedIn, a major social network, was founded by a youngster, right? Not at all! Reid Hoffman struggled with what to do after he graduated from Stanford. He decided to work, but to do so strategically, mapping out a plan of what he would need to learn before he started his own company.When he first started on his own, he founded a networking site called Socialnet, believing that having a great matching algorithm would guarantee success. He tried advertising his new site through magazines and newspapers, but never found traction with the idea. In the end, he left and joined PayPal before leaving his position with the company in 2002 to co-found LinkedIn. Hoffman was 35 when he founded the company and 43 when it went public.
5. Wally Blume, Denali Flavors
If the thought of tomato-flavored ice cream turns your stomach, you’re not alone. Wally Blume had a successful 20-year career, but knew he had to move on when his boss decided to move forward with that crazy idea. In 1995, in his mid-50s, he started his own ice cream company, Denali Flavors, where he created the famous Moose Tracks flavor.Today, this dairy treat brings in $80 million a year alone through licensing agreements. Denali now has over 40 flavors, and Blume is still going strong at the age of 70.
6. Carol Gardner, Zelda Wisdom
When you’re 52, newly divorced, broke and depressed, you’d think that the last thing on your mind would be starting a company. Then again, it might be just what the doctor ordered.After getting a dog at her therapist’s recommendation, Carol Gardner won a local Christmas card contest with a picture of the dog and a funny quip. The win inspired Gardner to start a greeting card company, which she named after her dog, Zelda. In 2010, Zelda Wisdom was valued at roughly $50 million, showing that you truly never know where your next great idea might come from.
Running a business isn’t easy -- it takes hard work and discipline to reach success. As a result, it should be unsurprising that, many times, it’s the older and wiser among us who are better at navigating that road. So don’t count yourself out, no matter what your age. Success can come to anyone at any time.
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