ceiling in the company

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I am a senior communications practitioner since 1994. I am now 7 years with the company and have been promoted once when all that joined after me have been promoted x2 x3 and x4. I am 42 years old and qualified more than my colleagues (MA Communication Management). I now feel I am luaghing stock and have no respect from my colleagues.

I always come with new ideas, listened to and after some time see them being implemented without getting any credit.

Your advise please.

-- ruth mzaidume (ruth.mzaidume@resbank.co.za), July 23, 2001

Answers

This is no help, but maybe try to get something in writing attesting to the fact that your ideas have been implemented and work, maybe a written performance evaluation. There are also Patent and Trade Mark Offices, although it's expensive depending upon what your ideas are and company policies vary on this.Maybe try to find out what they are doing that you possibly aren't. I don't know if it would help to ask for feedback or written evaluation which both parties sign? Maybe you are not 'laughing stock' at all, but in fact they are intimidated by you. Are they members of organizations or bring in additional funding? Sorry couldn't be of much more assistance and don't know what to tell you. I have the same problem of people leeching off of my ideas without credit. I was doing a lot better and working harder than someone's son, and they kept telling me what a good job I was doing, and telling me to hand everything over to this lazy jerk for him to brag about. My voluntary overtime by myself in an unstable job, of course a matter of being 'a team player'. Of course, they told me I was doing great while he was making the money when we held the same position and I had more experience and even management experience, which he lacked. He was stupid enough to brag about his paycheck and I don't recall wedding vows or other such nonsense. They considered me overqualified, and so they made me 'babysit the oh, of course, less fortunate' which was actually laziness. It was her son. I wish I knew what to tell you. I was hired as a permanent paid non- consulting employee for a business, not a non-profit organization volunteer by myself. Maybe try to figure out what they are doing that you aren't somehow. Good luck.

-- Michelle Moyer (mmmoyer@aol.com), July 31, 2001.

Ideas themselves do not guarantee promotion especially if you have become a production line for ideas. When you become a manufacturing factory for ideas, you can guarantee one thing, your intellectual capital becomes what I call an intangible fixed asset. What does this mean? It means that the product you are producing is being consumed, it means that your intellectual transactions are occuring from a fixed point. As long as your ideas are an output from a fixed point there is no reason for your company to change the nature of your intelletual factory.

The people who are moving ahead of you have discovered that the only benefit in becoming an intangible fixed asset is safety but not growth. To enable growth you have to stop becoming a fixed asset. How do you do that? Yo stop becoming a fixed asset, you become "marginal". This does not mean that you stop coming up with new ideas, it means learning to reverse the process i.e. to become a person who listens to other peoples ideas and to increase the marginal return of ALL ideas, not just your own.

There is a great difference today between "getting credit" and a "getting a pat on the back". The difference between these two forms of recognition lies in the way you fashion your personal and business accounts. If you want recognition in your personal account, it is a one way transaction. Your business account however is not a personal profit and loss statement, it is a balance sheet or in other words it conists of double entry transaction ie it can go up and it can go down. You will have to learn how to operate this balance sheet but first before you can do that you must learn how to enhance the ideas that exist 360 degrees around you. The people who have got ahead of you have enhanced ideas in this way, what you call "your ideas" are simply ideas on the organizations intellectual radar.

Business actually use a term to describe this today, it is called "intellectual capital". While most of the stuff above are ideas that I have generated, they are themselves a fixed asset if I fail to broaden the intellectual space around me and therefore make my contribution more valuable to my organization as a whole (business level) rather than at a personal level. It is this increasing of intellectual value which is what you are not doing. In a society governed by "intellectual capital" it is not the person who generates and formulates the idea that is rewarded but the person who knows how to extract, shape and spread the idea.

Now it does not matter if you do not understand some of the terms I used above or even some of the concepts that I have created, what matters is how you apply them. You say "I always come with new ideas", but what you do not say is that "I am surrounded by ideas and know how to utilize and enhance them for the benefit of my organization". That balance sheet I talk of is a business transaction with your organization. As long as you transact for personal recognition you will keep missing the big picture.

How do you see this big picture? Stand back and stop asking. Don't even e-mail me to ask for an explanation. Stop and look and see yourself as others see you not how you see others seeing you. You are not a laughing stock and the respect you talk of is just a line of credit in business. Where respect really matters is in two areas

1. Knowing that you have done the best that you could have done without wasting your time in trying to be perfect.

2. Knowing those that really love you are the ones who respect is the most valuable and most of those people are not people you work with, but people who live and share love with.

And Ruth, if you think that I do not know what I am talking about, then go across the pages of this website and see what else I have written. I too became a very good factory for my own personal profit and loss account but in the process did not pay the same amount of attention to my business balance sheet. Business is about debits and credits, profit and loss, revenue and expenses - those are called "tangible" items in standard book accounting but today business is about both the management of the tangible "standard accounting" and the intangible world of creating value from ideas. In other words the respect you need to obtain in your work life is a respect for "intellectual capital". Respect has always been a two way street but in this new intangible environment of focusing on growing intellectual capital is no longer a world where you give-you get, it is also a world where you get and then you give.

Mark Zorro

(Note "Mark Zorro" is a pseudonym I use on-line for personal reasons- it is derived from the term "Mark of Zorro". The handle was also chosen because Mark is also a shortform for my real name, which begins with the first two letters MA and ends with the last two letters RK).

-- Mark Zorro (zorromark@consultant.com), August 05, 2001.


Addendum:

A point of clarification regarding what I mean by an intangible balance sheet. This is an explanation of terms I used in the previous response rather than a reply to Ruth.

In standard accounting a balance sheet comprises of fixed assets balanced by liabilities and net worth. In my intangible balance sheet, the composition is intellectual assets rather than fixed assets, balanced by intellectual liabilities (ie what you do not know that you need to know or what you do not know that you do not know) and intellectual shareholder return ie the net worth of your "intellectual capital being returned to you.

The intangible profit and loss account is where the debits and credits of our personal transactions "ideas" and "relationships" are visualized. It is of course pointless in trying to create a physical ledger for this, because it is virtual. One of the prime reasons why CRM, KM, P2P etc initiatives are failing is because technology is seen as a physical resource and implemented before the "virtual resource" of an organizations intellectual capital has been understood. This virtual resource (which is far more than just people and business processes) must become the definer for the technology and not as it is done today where technology continues to fail and fit the virtual (intangible, intellectual capital) capacity. Indeed it merely shifts that capacity to a new area of learning rather than expand the existing area that I have defined as the intellectual radar".

-- Mark Zorro (zorromark@consultant.com), August 05, 2001.


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