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Wednesday, 26 March 2014

An Ethical way of managing the compliance departments

Insider trading and gift management is quite a risqué task. Getting caught in one of those trades, could be a serious liable offence. Compliance Department these days are working around smart trade. Their objective is to ensure that an organization has systems for internal control that adequately measure and
“ETHICS”, the word does not strike cords with compliance departments. Well!  Employee trading History and Insider compliance system (ETHICS) is a product of Arowana.
An online product (personal account dealing and gift register system) for all Employees interested in trading financial instruments, where both compliance and management approval is required plus an online capability to register the receipt & giving of gifts within any Organization.
Arowana has built a software system which will automate the current manual process of Personal Account Dealing and maintaining the Gift register of all relevant employees who wish to trade in various instruments (Stocks, Bonds, and Shares etc.) will be covered under this system rules. The system will record gifts being given or received by them as well.
The system will ensure expected level of corporate compliance/approvals in managing the aspects of corporate governance and enable the company to present the regulators with evidence that their employees are in compliance with pertinent rules & regulations prevalent in the country with regards to Insider trading.
So now compliance departments have a system that has a key aspect of being closely linked with the management of bribery and corruption, more elaborately enacted under the Bribery Act and FCPA.


Highlights for Insiders Trading:
§  Pre-trade clearance
§  Minimum holding period and trading in window close period violations to your notice.
§  Trading Validation and Trading restrictions
§  Unusual trading patterns alerting
§  Pre-clearance and reporting of gifts, entertainment and outside business activities,
§  Master view of compliance tasks and cases for the compliance officer,
§  Multiple restricted lists,
§  Pre-loaded forms of Exchange
§  Customized to do list and task tracking for each employee
§  Global security master
§  Automated Alert Correlation

§  Scheduled automated email triggers for Reminders and Escalations
  

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Monday, 24 March 2014

Managing staff travels with DART

Duty and Recreational travel, is an application developed specifically for the Airline industry, which addresses the Airline Company’s Staff travel needs.
Discounted or free travel is one of the best motivational tools in the airline industry. The airlines thus benefit from attracting quality resources and gain additional revenues.
Airlines around the world find it complex enough to handle the Staff travel needs of its employees.
At Arowana Consulting, we have developed Duty and Recreational Travel with our long and vast expertise in the airline domain to simply this ticketing process.
Any airline would have to offer Duty and Recreational travel tickets to its employees/partners. DART automates the process and can distinguish between Duty (Free Travel) and Recreational (Free or discounted travel) to meet the needs of the company.
By engaging DART, the airlines can save costs, time and nullify errors caused by human intervention.
DART has matured as a product and is implemented across many airline companies around the world.
DART integrates with the ERP of the airline this enables DART to seamlessly integrate with the company details, and eliminate manual entry or duplication of work
 DART also provides seamless integration with various third party interfaces such as the various GDS, payment gateways etc. 
Arowana Consulting has partnered with industry stalwarts to build DART. Hence, DART has the unique ability to interface with all the reputed GDS from across the globe.
Over the last 2 years DART has matured as a product. Our latest implementation has just gone live a few weeks ago in 2014 for one of the largest private commercial airline in India. The latest implementation was one of the most challenging ones. Globally airlines were facing different set of challenges, with the implementation of DART we are sure the customer is now equipped to face these on a better footing.
The last implementation had many technical challenges but with Arowana’s unique capabilities we have overcome them with ease.
DART has since evolved as a product that in future,  can be delivered as a product to any of the airlines companies in minimal time with keeping up the same quality of DART for which it is renowned.

Follow us at : www.stafftravelsystem.com
To know more about our other products: www.arowanaconsulting.com

Thursday, 20 March 2014

The First (and Most Important) Rule of Success




It's a bit like having a secret weapon--but only when you do it the right way and for the right reasons.
A standard image of the entrepreneur is the type-A personality in a body fueled by equal parts adrenaline, caffeine, and ambition. He or she is the go-getter who's trying to get ahead. The stereotype is not without a reason. However, it can blind you to an approach that can be more effective: being helpful.
At The Atlantic, Adam Grant wrote about how "givers" in business could enjoy personal career productivity in the long run, even if it seemed that they lost something in the short term. There are three reasons why a giving nature can result in success.
  • Givers create stronger relationships with others, which helps in sales, marketing, making deals, and attracting customers.
  • Helping others creates motivation and provides the energy "to work harder, longer, and smarter."
  • When you volunteer to help, you learn new skills that build your professional strengths and knowledge.
All true. The people I've known in business who were absolutely best at what they did were those willing to help others achieve. Are there people who manage to get ahead by taking advantage of others? Certainly. The problem they have, though, is that when things get tough, there's rarely anyone willing to give them some help, and they haven't necessarily learned the skills they need to solve the problems themselves.
Giving is a characteristic that you can develop and learn to better employ for the sakes of others and of yourself, whether you're an employee or the boss. Here are three ways to do it:

Know the people (and the jobs they do) at your company's lowest level.

There is nothing demeaning about being able to do the lowliest jobs in a company. If you're the boss and someone leaves, what are you going to do? Complain on social media or roll up your sleeves and do what needs to be done? People who don't understand how all the parts of a business run don't know how to manage because they don't really know what has to happen for the company to run. If you're the boss, you don't necessarily have to help the janitor sweep the floors, but you do need to take an interest in that job and person and see how you can help make their experiences better and more successful.

Spread the wealth without asking "Where's mine?"

Come to being helpful with a pure heart. The minute it becomes a quid pro quo, you've lost most of the benefits because you no longer have the right relationship to what you are doing. Instead of learning and building your abilities and understanding, you're distracted by looking for your reward and have missed what you could have received.

Everyone else goes first.

I can remember years ago running a small business. Money was tight, so when it came in, employees got paid first, as did vendors. I got what was left over. That's how a business should be. You own the company and so you get the ultimate rewards and risks. Similarly, you have your job to do as boss, but other than that, everyone else comes before your comforts and preferences. That means employees, customers, business partners, and vendors. Make sure they are set and you'll find all that is paid back to you multiple times. I don't know why it works; I've just seen that it does. Maybe it's because you'll never have made an army of resentful people all waiting to see you fall.
Source: http://www.inc.com/erik-sherman/the-first-rule-of-success-help-others-get-ahead.html

Wednesday, 19 March 2014

Little Data vs. Big Data: Nine Types of Data and How They Should Be Used



  • How today's overwhelming volume of data is making it difficult for marketers and advertisers to know which information is significant and which is pure noise
  • How different types of data should be used and for what purposes
  • How small amounts of data, if correctly obtained and properly analyzed, can provide better marketing insight more cost-efficiently.



  • You are not feeling well, so you visit your friendly family doctor. He puts you in a new electronic scanner and generates 28 trillion measurements of your temperature all over the surface of your body. He then saves all of these measurements and, using advanced statistical algorithms and supercomputers, announces that your temperature is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. What a relief! Big Data to the rescue.
    The Bandwagon
    As the Big Data bandwagon picks up momentum, consultants, professors, conference organizers, authors, magazines, blogs, software firms, pundits, crooks, private equity firms, and computer hardware manufacturers are clamoring to get aboard. Rarely has a bandwagon attracted so much attention or so many passengers.
    The basic premises of Big Data appear to be the following:
    • More data are always better than less data.
    • Volume, variety, and velocity of data create new sources of potential knowledge and prescience.
    • With Big Data, all questions can be answered: The "why" will finally be revealed to the human race, and the future can be accurately predicted.
    Is Big Data an accurate picture of the future, or is it simply a mirage shimmering in the distant desert heat? Is it the pathway to ultimate truth, or is it only a bandwagon of exaggerated promises and illusory dreams?
    The truth is that the solution to marketing and business problems—and the identification of strategic opportunities—often lies in the realm of Little Data, not Big Data. You don't have to boil the ocean to determine its salt content. You don't have to eat the whole steer to know it's tough.
    The Limits of Data
    The preponderance of business data—indeed, all data—in the world is historical data, or "tracking" data, such as financial data, sales data, customer behavioral data, weather data, and inventory data. Virtually all data tend to be backward-looking, analogous to looking in the rearview mirror to steer a car forward.
    No matter how current or instantaneous data are (i.e., the velocity), or no matter the sheer amount of data, the backward-looking bias is an omnipresent limitation. We might see trends in that data that give us an inkling of the near-term future, and we might be able to find out what has driven a firm's success in the past, but most historical data are of limited value in predicting the future.
    Data You Can Trust
    Often, without thinking, we tend to see all data as equal, but rarely is that true. The corporate world is awash in data. It streams in from all directions 24 hours a day, and the data deluge continues to worsen.
    In fact, the growing flood of data is part of the problem. More data often means more confusion. Which data are correct? What data can be trusted?
    Here's a point of view on the trustworthiness of various types of data, ranked from most trustworthy to least.
    1. Experimental data
    Carefully designed and carefully controlled experiments, conducted by objective third parties who are experts in such experiments, yield the most trustworthy data. Before-after and side-by-side controls are employed, along with sophisticated statistical analyses, to separate the noise from the signal.
    2. Survey research data
    Scientific research studies, conducted by experienced professionals who are objective third parties, yield trustworthy data. Often the data is experimental in nature. Research design, normative data, mathematical modeling, stimulus controls, statistical controls, historical experience, quality-assurance standards, etc., tend to make the data very precise. Noise tends to be minimal.
    3. Marketing-mix modeling data
    The creation of an analytical database, the cleansing and normalizing of that data, and the use of multivariate statistics and modeling to isolate and neutralize some of the noise tend to make marketing-mix modeling data better than actual sales data.
    The signal in marketing-mix modeling data is more stable, more reliable, and more measurable. This type of data can be valuable in helping companies understand what variables are driving their businesses (is it media advertising, or the number of salesmen, or pricing differentials?), but it generally takes multiple years of data to get maximum value out of marketing-mix modeling.
    4. Media-Mix Modeling Data
    This is the same concept as marketing-mix modeling, just applied to a different set of variables. The same general rules apply. An analytic database, data cleansing, modeling, and statistics allow the noise in the data to be minimized, so that the effects of various media can be isolated. Again, if combined with controlled experiments, the data and analyses are much more explanatory.
    5. Sales Data
    Sales data are pretty good, but not perfect, measures of actual sales. But sales are not reliable and valid measures of advertising effectiveness, optimal media spending, product quality, service productivity, competitive activities, etc.
    Sales data can only be trusted so far. The economy, competitive activity, the weather, inflation, the vacation cycle, news events, political events, aberrations in inventories and distribution, pricing disturbances, etc., create false echoes and distorted illusions. Sales data are not good measures of cause and effect. Sales are reasonably good measures of what happened, but not why it happened or what forces caused it to happen.
    6. Eye-Tracking Data
    With steady improvements in measurement equipment and software, the direction the human eye is pointing can be determined with a high degree of accuracy—less than one degree of error in a controlled environment with high-quality equipment. Accordingly, you can generate useful diagnostic information to help understand why a package, website, or advertisement is failing to attract attention or failing to register certain messages or images.
    7. Biometric or Physiological Measurements
    Galvanic skin response, eye pupil dilation, heart rate, EEG (brainwave) measurements, facial emotions recognition, etc., are very interesting and exciting, and they may one day open portals into the human soul, but for the present these measures are largely speculative and unproven. Some of these measures are reasonably good at tracking arousal, but there's no precise way to know if the arousal is positive or negative without bringing in survey or qualitative research.
    8. Communities or Advisory Panel Data
    Many large companies have bought into systems that allow them to frequently talk to and survey a small group of target consumers over and over again. Surveys among this group are conducted by various folks in the corporation on a daily or weekly basis. The cost per survey or measurement is relatively low—if the quality of outcomes is not taken into account. Such communities are not truly representative, not randomly chosen, and seldom ever validated. Over time, the risks of conditioning and learning undermine the representativeness of the community, assuming it existed at the outset.
    9. Social Media Data
    Social media data are very popular in corporate America. The data are comparatively inexpensive, often massive, and real-time (day by day, hour by hour). Many new software tools and systems make analyses of the data relatively easy.
    Social media data are, perhaps, most valuable as an early-warning system—of something going wrong, of a competitive initiative, or of an unexpected aberration. Social media data, however, must always be viewed with suspicion and skepticism, for several reasons:
    • Many product categories and brands are scarcely ever mentioned in social media, making sample sizes too small for data reliability.
    • Social media comments are influenced by the news cycle, special events, media advertising, promotions, publicity, movies, competitive activity, and television shows (i.e., there is a lot of noise in the data).
    • Social media data are subject to manipulation. You may think you are following an important trend in the data, only to learn later it was a clever ruse to confuse by a competitor. Increasingly, corporations and other organizations are striving to create social media content and manage social media comments, so the research value of the data is rapidly diminishing.
    • As social media comments are identified and collected via Web scraping, we almost never know the exact source, the context, the stimulus, or the history that underlie a comment. These unknowns make interpretation risky, indeed. That's why social-media data must be viewed with trepid spirit and jaundiced eye.
    Little Data
    Corporate decision-makers often would be better served if they rely on tried-and-true tools and systems from the world of Little Data, rather than illusions from Big Data. Sampling theory teaches that if the sample is random, one can measure the behavior or mood of the whole by talking to very few people.
    A sample of 1,500 is sufficient to predict who will win a presidential election. A sample of 200-300 respondents is generally sufficient to predict how much the whole population will like a new product or service. A sample of 200 users can test a new peanut butter in-home for a week, and from that it can be precisely determined whether the product is optimal and what its market share will be once introduced.
    Those are examples of Little Data. Survey research is relatively inexpensive, yet very accurate, because professional researchers know the source, stimulus, context, and history—and have tried-and-true measuring instruments, normative data, quality assurance, and controls.
    Marketing research can be designed to be forward-looking and predictive, rather than backward-looking. Experienced researchers can create alternative futures and measure the relative appeal of the differing visions of the future. Those researchers can predict the sales volume of new products within narrow tolerances, based on survey research. They can optimize the formulation of a new product via product testing. They can accurately predict the effectiveness of new commercials long before they air. They can measure the size and composition of an industry or category with amazing precision, based solely on scientific sampling and surveys.
    All of that research is based on Little Data. The data are derived from random sampling, carefully controlled experiments, and/or scientific surveys. The sample and sampling error are known; the stimulus is known; the questions are known; the context is understood; and the meaning of the answers is known.
    Despite the marketing hoopla and the gurus touting Big Data, Little Data often provides a more accurate basis for sound corporate decision-making.

    Read more: http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2014/24670/little-data-vs-big-data-nine-types-of-data-and-how-they-should-be-used#ixzz2wPqpGnRM

    Follow us at: www.arowanaconsulting.com

    Tuesday, 18 March 2014

    What Is Customer Experience?

    To get customer experience right, companies first need to get the definition right, according to an enlightening talk I had with Esteban Kolsky, the principal and founder of ThinkJar. He says that the digital transformation of businesses and the inbound revolution have brought about a radically different way of doing business, which has changed the meaning of thecustomer experience. Kolsky offers the following five insights into how the customer experience is being redefined.
    1. Customers are not listening to what you have to say
    Inbound marketing came about because customers aren’t listening anymore. “Customers have the information and no longer rely on the company for this,” says Kolsky. Inbound marketing is more about managing social channels than about managing content and the flow of communication. 
    2. Customers know more about your business than you do
    Kolsky uses the example of duct tape, created as an adhesive tape for use in space. His daughter spent the summer building wallets and t-shirts out of duct tape. “A company can intend a product for a specific use, but very quickly loses control of the product and its use,” says Kolsky. The question becomes, how do you leverage what customers are doing, and how do you use the information to dynamically change the way you do business? This is the digital transformation that goes with inbound. It’s not just about the customer; it is about what the customer chooses to do in relation to your business.
    3. Customers create their own experience 
    Companies need to throw out the notion that they can control the customer experience, Kolsky states. Customers create their own experiences. They do not wait for companies to tell them how to do it; they push companies to enable them to do what they want. Companies must transform their businesses and get out of the way so customers can create their own experiences; this is the true definition of customer experience. It is about building the infrastructure that allows customers to do whatever they want to do, through whatever channel they choose to do it.
    4. Customer interactions are complex and unpredictable
    In the old days, customers would call the number listed for customer service. Today they send an email or call the main number, and they know you have to answer it. Companies can no longer have a silo that corresponds to CRM. Interactions have changed from well-defined to anything-goes.
    CRM has become the place where the data is stored in a common infrastructure-;an interface to the experience. It is an access point for customers to draw the information to create their own experiences.
    5. Customer communities are where the knowledge is
    Kolsky found that knowledge decays at the rate of 50 percent every minute. The problemwith knowledge stored in books or accessed via search engines is that it is not contextual. “If you can ask a person a question and get an answer in 30 seconds, then not only is that person’s reputation increased but your knowledge of where to go for information is increased,” he says.
    Communities are going to replace knowledge management systems, because that is where the knowledge resides. There is no value to a knowledge base that decays over time, when you can directly query knowledgeable people. This is the whole purpose of social media. Community members will have reputation scores and earn the trust and respect of peers, where the strongest voice rises to the top of the forum.
    Source: http://www.inc.com/disneyinstitute/afshar/what-is-customer-experience.html

    Monday, 17 March 2014

    The internet of things needs anti-virus protection

    As more and more everyday objects get connected to the internet, there is a pressing need to protect them as we do computers, says Slate's Future Tense blogger Lily Hay Newman

    As the internet of things grows and more devices than ever have network connectivity baked in, you might start to wonder what protects all of these smart home appliances and media streaming dongles against hacks. The answer: pretty much nothing. Companies can release security updates or patches when they learn about vulnerabilities in their devices, but who is going to do a software update on their refrigerator?
    The problem is particularly troubling in an industry where there are internet routers in every office and a voice over internet protocol (VoIP) phone on every desk. Even if attackers can't get into your computer because it's running anti-virus software, they can still get eyes and ears in your office by hacking a VoIP phone or video console unit. And since those devices are behind office firewalls, they might even be able to infiltrate network servers from there.
    In an attempt to implement a large-scale solution for corporate and government application, a group of researchers at Columbia University in New York have started a company, Red Balloon, to sell security defences for embedded devices – that is the little computers in electronics that don't look recognisably like a laptop, desktop, or server. The group has funding from Columbia and the US Department of Homeland Security, and had funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for earlier research. Last week at the security summit RSA Conference, Red Balloon presented a new hack of Avaya-brand VoIP phones and showed how their defence system, known as the Symbiote, can alert a device's owner to an attack.

    Spot the weakness

    "Now that we know that these phones can be hacked and used as eyes and ears by the attackers, it's time we started demanding real security on the phones," says Ang Cui, Red Balloon's chief scientist. "These phones, like most other embedded devices I've looked at, are about as protected as my laptop back in 2006, without anti-virus."
    In the past, Red Balloon has demonstrated exploits of multiple Cisco VoIP phones. Combined with the Avaya demonstration, they have now exposed vulnerabilities in products that together represent more than half of total VoIP phone market share worldwide. That's a lot of vulnerable phones.
    Cui, along with Red Balloon's director Salvatore Stolfo and the rest of their research team, are offering corporations and government agencies a free pilot licence of their package of defence products, AESOP. The goal is to install the product on the large quantity of devices these groups already use to offer protection, but also do recon to see if the devices have already been exploited, and by whom. Long term, the idea is for Red Balloon software to come standard on new devices so they are pre-protected for consumers.

    The Symbiote

    The main component of Red Balloon's defence, the Symbiote, is a small piece of code that is injected into a "host" device. The product is "operating system agnostic", meaning it can analyse and protect any device even if it is running a proprietary operating system that Red Balloon couldn't have accessed and parsed in advance. Once injected, the Symbiote lies in wait, monitoring the system for suspicious activity like modifications in certain parts of the code. If it detects something, the Symbiote alerts the device's owner and other Symbiotes running on the same network.
    The Red Balloon researchers aren't the only group working on defence solutions for embedded devices, though. At MITRE, a non-profit organisation that runs federally funded research and development centres, researchers are using work started at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to develop their own approach to system security. Xeno Kovah, MITRE's information security engineer, explains that the approach he is working on also lives on a device, but isn't looking for code modifications.
    Instead it assumes that an attacker has full knowledge of the system they are hacking, and allows her to try to conceal her presence on the device. This very attempt at concealment involves sending requests to the device system that create a detectable change in the amount of time it takes for requests to be answered on a device, indicating the presence of the attacker.
    Kovah points out that if Red Balloon's Symbiote is focused on checking whether code is intact, an attacker could manipulate the system to make the Symbiote think that the system still looks the same when it has actually been modified. Additionally, Kovah points out that not all attacks involve modifying code. Instead, some are targeted at redirecting the flow of data through a system in deleterious ways.

    In the wild

    "The software Symbiote definitely does defeat the type of attackers that are in the wild right now," Kovah says, but "I don't have a lot of faith in it long-term". Kovah worries that if attackers can control and warp measurements of a system, they can make products like the Symbiote send back normal readings even though a device has been compromised.
    Cui says that he thinks timing-based attestation is a strong option in some contexts, but is "infeasible for the general case". And he adds that AESOP, the security software suite, includes a component for evaluating the code that coordinates software and hardware (the firmware) and removing any unnecessary or easily repeatable code that a hacker could infiltrate or hide behind. Most importantly, AESOP is both a pilot of Red Balloon's products and "a recon mission for us to find real embedded attacks in places we think we'll find them". The data from the pilot will inform Red Balloon's next development steps by giving the group more information about who is currently exploiting embedded device weaknesses and why.
    Everyone agrees, though, that embedded devices "have negligible security", as Kovah says. "At least the Red Balloon approach gives you some ability to detect whether or not there's manipulation of the device. That's the kind of capability that's not widely available."
    Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25212-the-internet-of-things-needs-antivirus-protection.html?page=2#.Uyb6PKi9bE0

    Friday, 14 March 2014

    Forget Time Management. Try Attention Management

    Don't spend your day constantly battling the clock--it's a battle you won't win. Instead, decide what your priorities are and focus your attention on them.


    No matter what you do, time marches on at its own pace--tick, tick, tick. There's nothing you can do to change that (unless you can travel close to the speed of light). Time is a great equalizer; it runs at the same speed for everybody, rich or poor, jet pilot or snail farmer. You can't manufacture time, you can't reproduce time, you can't slow time down, or turn it around and make it run in the other direction. You can't trade bad hours for good ones either.

    What you can manage, however, is your attention. Attention is a resource we all possess. Your attention reflects your conscious decisions about which activities will occupy your time. You are where your attention is, not necessarily where your body is.

    The first step is to precisely understand your priorities. There's a big difference between managing your attention to accomplish priorities and checking off items on your to-do list. Your natural tendency is to do what is fun, convenient, or absolutely necessary at any given time--but your true priorities may not fit into any of those categories. So, ask yourself, "If I could accomplish only one thing right now, what would that one thing be?" Your answer will quickly identify your top priority, which is where you should be directing your attention.

    Dwight D. Eisenhower, the World War II general who went on to become a popular President of the United States, used what is now called the Eisenhower Method for managing attention. After identifying the tasks confronting him, he drew a square and divided it into four quadrants. Each task was then designated to one of the four quadrants, according to which of the 4 D's was the most appropriate: Do it, dump it, delegate it, or defer it.

    Source: http://www.inc.com/lee-colan/manage-attention-not-time.html

    Follow us at: www.arowanaconsulting.com

    Thursday, 13 March 2014

    Promotions Equal Higher Productivity

    Moving into new roles is critical for your employees as they grow your business.


    As CEO of a company that grew 450% last year, I often think about creating resiliency at The Grommet. With a team that went from 12 to 50 people in the last 18 months, people are constantly being stretched. Promotions often prompt a star player to fundamentally redefine what success means in their next role. This can be really disconcerting, but relying on an old playbook within a known comfort zone can be very counterproductive.
    It's a common CEO problem: how to get your best people to "promote themselves."
    At The Grommet, we recently had a team member leave and quickly realized that she was one of only two people who knew how to perform a critical daily activity. She likely dealt with it quietly while she was employed with us. But at her departure we realized that this 'good soldier' behavior inadvertently put the company at a slight risk. As CEO, it is ultimately my responsibility to make sure our organization is resilient, so I am grateful that this alerted our team to look out for other single points of failure.
    I have been thinking about how to be more resilient for many years working executive VP level jobs on a part-time basis. My boss in three of these assignments (Keds, Stride Rite, Hasbro) was the now-famous Meg Whitman and I was under constant pressure to deliver at a very high level, even though I only had 60% of the time my peers had in the office. I simply could not compete on the basis of "hours worked" so I had to find another way to be valuable to Meg and my employer.


    These are two key ways I learned to promote myself and my employees.

 

    Delegate as a rule of thumb.

    My advice to anyone rising through the ranks is that you have to change your idea of what it means to be responsible to your company. When you are early in your career or starting a new role, you have to cover all the bases to show your competency. Once you've done that, delegate.


    You need to let other people learn the same skills and activities you learned so they can advance, and you create a pipeline of talent. Your company needs you to bump yourself upstairs.

 There is a beautiful synchronicity between spreading out the knowledge base and getting yourself promoted. An insecure or inexperienced person might "hoard" knowledge, while a confident or experienced person will share it. This advice applies to CEOs too.
    David Rosenblatt, CEO of 1stdibs.com says, "I only do the things that only I can do. So if it's someone else's job to do it, I try not to do it. If I find myself doing too many of those things that are actually someone else’s job, then… I probably don’t have the right person in that role."
    This reminds me of the advice I heard from an elementary school principal: "When helping your child do their homework, if you find yourself holding the pencil, back off."
    As a CEO my job is to establish goals, ie. the "what" we need to do, and allocate resources correctly. But I expect my direct reports to be experienced enough to figure out the "how" of deploying those resources to meet the goals. Same goes down the ranks.

    Accept that your time is worth more.

    Stop trading your time for your salary. A promotion means your hourly rate has gone up. Your company is paying you to move the ball forward and paying you for your brain, not just your time. Both business owners and employees need to 'think up' in this way--this will also be reflected in the way you approach clients and fees. Your growth as an individual and company will create better products and services for which you can charge more.
    The end goal is to make sure your company is recognizing the competencies of your rising stars and rewarding them in turn which advances the company as a whole. And this, coincidentally, keeps you operating as the CEO, not someone you used to be.
    Source: http://www.inc.com/jules-pieri/promotions-equal-higher-productivity-for-your-firm.html