Is your promotion really necessary? Many workers focus their hopes on climbing the hierarchy of their organisations. The prospect of higher pay helps explain their ambition, but so does the greater status that comes with each successive title.
This scramble can often end in disappointment. The Peter principle, developed by Laurence Peter for a book published in 1969, states that workers get promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. It makes perfect sense. If you are good at your job, you rise up the career ladder. Eventually, there will be a job you are not good at and at that point your career will stall. The logical corollary is that any senior staff members who have been in their job for an extended period are incompetent.
There is another problem with chasing the promotion chimera. A recent study found that companies have a strong tendency to promote the best sales people. Convincing others to buy goods and services is a useful skill, requiring charisma and persistence. But, as the authors of the study point out, these are not the same capabilities as the strategic planning and administrative competence needed to lead a sales team.
The research then looked at what happened after these super-sales people were promoted. Their previous sales performance was actually a negative indicator of managerial success. The sales growth of workers assigned to the star sellers was 7.5 percentage points lower than for those whose managers were previously weaker performers.
Scott Adams, the cartoonist, described this problem in his book, “The Dilbert Principle”. In his world, the least competent people get promoted because these are the people you don’t want to do the actual work. It is foolish to promote the best salesperson or computer programmer to a management role, since the company will then be deprived of unique skills.
Bartleby (a character in an English novel) is not an expert at climbing the greasy pole. In part, that is because he has observed a variant on the Peter and Dilbert principles; what might be dubbed the Bartleby curse. People get promoted until they reach a level when they stop enjoying their jobs. At this point, it is not just their competence that is affected; it is their happiness as well.
The trick to avoiding this curse is to stick to what you like doing. If you enjoy teaching, don’t be a headmaster or college principal. If you like writing articles, editing other people’s work may not give you the same degree of satisfaction.
The $5bn fine for Facebook by The Federal Trade Commission (FTC)—assuming it is approved by the Department of Justice—is both eye-catching and sets a new record. The fine follows an investigation which began last March, triggered by the Cambridge Analytica case in which personal information was leaked to a political consultancy through a third party. Using fines to encourage better privacy protection is a questionable strategy. If they become seen as the cost of carrying on with business as usual, the FTC will be undermined.
The banking sector’s treatment after the financial crisis does not give cause for hope. As with Facebook, regulators there failed to act until the damage was plain to see. Faced with overwhelming public pressure, they hurriedly applied hefty financial penalties to make up for it. Over a decade on from the global financial crisis, many of the fundamental ways in which banks operate remain worryingly unchanged.
Over the past five years the utopianism that initially prevailed around the digital economy has been replaced by a “techlash”. Digital groups have transformed the way companies work and offered more choice for consumers. But the focus now is on getting tech companies to change their structure and behaviour, rather than price fines into their business models.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic presidential hopeful, has proposed breaking up companies such as Facebook, Google and Amazon. In Germany, Facebook’s attempt to pool data from across its platforms without user consent was blocked. EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager is launching a formal investigation into Amazon’s data practices and how it wears two hats, as a retailer and a marketplace for rivals.
Antitrust actions would reduce the risks that combined data sets from different platforms pose to privacy. Criminal sanctions for top executives, perhaps including jail time, may ultimately be necessary to achieve genuine changes in conduct. Until now, very few have faced any meaningful penalties for their actions. While the “move fast and break things” mentality may be embedded in these companies, the risk of personal consequences could act as a serious deterrent.
Even with its $5bn settlement, Facebook’s commitment to changing its ways when it comes to protecting user data and privacy remains dubious. Making big data companies more sensitive to privacy will require changing their relationship with data. Ensuring that happens needs measures and sanctions that go well beyond fines. There is no turning back.
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