Aerospace Software

The Best Promotion Policy in Organisations

A non-DO-178B post after a long time.

Among the winners of Ignobel prize this time are three Italians who have "demonstrated mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random."

Yeah you go that right - random, not merit based, promotion.

The three Italians are Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy.

Here is their conclusion extracted from their paper, The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study

... we obtained the counterintuitive result that the best strategies for improving, or at least for not diminishing, the efficiency of an organization, when one ignores the actual mechanism of competence transmission, are those of promoting an agent at random or of randomly alternating the promotion of the best and the worst members.

 By the way, Peter's Principle States:

"Every new member in a hierarchical organization climbs the hierarchy until he/she reaches his/her level of maximum incompetence."

I can imagine the management gurus squirming after this mathematical confirmation of Peter's Principle.

But then you always knew this, didn't you? Promoting an excellent software engineer to a managerial post is a sort of double whammy: You lose an excellent technical chap and get a lousy manager.

But before you go on to implement the new promotion policy, please have another good look at the conclusion. The words "when one ignores the actual mecahmism of competence transmission" hold the key to merit based promotion. Think about it!

Thoughts On Hype Over Leadership ... Continues

I have posted on this iconoclastic book Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Non-Sense in my other blog before. Readers who are familiar with Hard Facts ... therefore shouldn't be surprised that the most objective criticism of leadership comes from here.

I have also posted my views on leadership here & here. So naturally I was quite pleased to get supporting material from two professors from Stanford.

Hard Facts ... has a complete chapter (Are Great Leaders In Control Of Their Companies?) dedicated to leadership where it explores (explodes?) the myths of leadership.  I reproduce a few relevant text.

History is filled with leaders who make a big difference in the world: Gandhi ... Martin Luther King Jr. ... Queen Elizabeth I ... Winston Churchill ... and Lyndon Johnson[.] ... Leaders make a difference on a smaller organizational scale, as well. [S]ystematic quantitative research demonstrates that leadership can influence organizational performance. ... Leaders not only influence indicators of performance such as sales, profits, productivity, or budget allocations, they also affect their organization's interpersonal climate and the satisfaction and mental well-being of those they lead. ...

Nonetheless, leaders and managers often have far less influence over the performance than most people think. ... One study of the performance of 167 companies over a 20-year period sought to allocate variation in performance to the effects of industry, year (time period, which presumably measures general economic conditions), company-specific effects, and the change in leadership. Not surprisingly, the conclusion was that company and industry had much larger effects on variation in sales, profits, and profit margins than did changes in leadership. [M]ost [scholars] agree that the effects of leadership on performance are modest under most conditions, strong under a few conditions, and absent in others. 

I could go on and on quoting this book to prove my point that leadership is a function of followers and circumstances.
By the way, Hard Facts ... goes on to list fundamental guidelines for what leaders should do. It is a good read.