YES Network President & CEO TRACY DOLGIN was featured in Sunday’s N.Y. TIMES “Corner Office” feature and talked about his management style. Below are some of the highlights.
Dolgin: I’ve really tried to use the Reverse Peter Principle at the YES Network.
N.Y. Times: Explain that for me.
Dolgin: Let’s start with the Peter Principle. Most people start out as doers, and they have a function -- they’re a marketing person, a human-resource person, a finance person, a production person. And they get really good at doing that as they gain more experience. The reason they usually get promoted is not because someone innately thought that the person would make a great manager. They get promoted because they were a great doer. Is the same person going to be a great manager? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. The Peter Principle holds that as people get promoted again and again, they keep doing less and managing more until they get to a point where they stop getting promoted because they’re not as good at their new job. The Peter Principle says that you end up in the job you’re the worst at. So, I said, let’s try the Reverse Peter Principle.
The company was small enough so that if I found the best doers of every single critical function and convinced them to come to the YES Network to manage less and do more, to create a flat organization where they were going to be the best doers in the world, we would actually be able to create something incredible. That would allow us to compete with the big boys and maximize the business by out-executing them. Just change the rules and you could compete with them, because now I could out-execute them because my executors would be the best people at executing, and they would be spending 90 percent of their time executing and not managing. So when I went out and recruited, I basically told people my theory, and that we were all, including myself, going to go from being a manager to a doer. I was looking for the best people in each particular function (N.Y. TIMES,3/4).
