Power_ Why Some People Have Itand Others Don't - Jeffrey Pfeffer [12]
Tina Brown’s performance as a magazine editor depends on what criteria you choose to evaluate her work. She presided over great growth in advertising revenue and circulation. She garnered press attention for herself and the magazines. But there was no economic profit. That might not have mattered to S. I. Newhouse, the billionaire whose Advance Publications owned The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. The absence of profit apparently mattered more to the Hearst Corporation, co-owner of Talk.
No one is going to perform equally well on all the dimensions of their work. What you can do is consistently emphasize those aspects on which you do well. When Matt Lauer of the Today television show interviewed Tina Brown right after Talk folded, he pressed her to admit that she had a flawed business model. Her constant refrain—that the magazine had great content and that advertising was growing even in the midst of the recession.
Chris was the CEO of a human capital software company selling a hosted service focused on selecting hourly employees. His venture-funded company operated in an increasingly competitive market and some rivals offered similar products at much lower pricing. One way to compete would have been to offer an increasing range of services to manage employees over the life cycle from hiring through career development to retirement. But Chris’s company had an inferior technology platform and Chris was no technologist, so he could not lead a technology enhancement effort.
To lock in customers to make the company more salable, Chris and his management team offered reduced pricing for customers who renewed their contracts in advance of expiration. In his presentation to the board, Chris maintained that this strategy was a great way to grow the amount of deferred revenue on the books, ensure customer continuity, and make the company more valuable by preempting competitive threats. The presentation diverted the board’s attention away from why reduced prices were required to lock in business.
It was a board member who provided data showing Chris’s company was losing market share to competitors. But Chris had defined performance criteria in a way that made him look good. After the company was sold at a multiple of revenue about one-third that of competitors, with Chris nonetheless pocketing about $4 million, the new buyer lost customers—defections had been delayed but not prevented.
There are limits to what you can do to affect the criteria used to judge your work. But you can highlight those dimensions of job performance that favor you—and work against your competition.
REMEMBER WHAT MATTERS TO YOUR BOSS
When Rudy Crew ran Miami’s schools, the district budget was about $4.5 billion and the school system employed more than 55,000 people. Crew may have thought his job was to improve school performance, but with vast resources at stake, some school board members were interested in who was getting the contracts and the jobs. Fraught with divisions along racial and class lines, the school board apparently cared a lot about the ethnic composition of the senior staff. As one person, providing public comment at the school board meeting that began Crew’s dismissal, stated, if Rudy Crew’s last name had been “Cruz,” perhaps he would have kept his job, given the large Latino population in Miami. And, of course, school board members cared about their egos, and Crew was not nearly deferential enough to earn some members’ endearment.
One of the reasons that performance