Not everyone gets his due

We've all been through it. The feeling that comeuppance will surely come to the person who seems to have jumped lines. The sleazeball who managed to get promoted faster by licking the boss, the dumb girl who rose because of her 'looks', or the regular cases of nepotism where the owner's son/nephew/whatever gets to to take charge without knowning zilch.

Well, I've got bad news for you guys. All these so called underserving people donot necessarily meet a messy end, trying to atone for their 'mistake'. Chances are, unless they are complete retards, they would survive, and in a lot of cases, even thrive. Why? Because, if you are in a seat of power, knowledge will also flow to you at a preferential rate. I've seen this work through out my life, including with myself too.

In my case, I had joined this financial firm which promptly put me in charge of managing theoir receivables in a region. I knew zilch about their famous processes, customers or even how to go about doing it. But luckily, we had vendors who used to actually do it for us. Seeing a new man in charge, the vendors took no time in doing everything they could to curry favour, including sharing pretty much every trade secret, if only to undercut the other guy.. Result was, after a difficult three months, I had learnt enough to actually pull off the best subsequent 9 month performance the region had ever seen, leading to all round praises and bonuses.

This was a phenomenon I was to repeat, with me on the other side. As I joined an online media company dependent on advertising, we quickly realised that our prospective clients knew zilch about online ads, how you could track them, etc. Thus, we began a programme of touching as many as we could, trying to give them as simple, and as comprehensive understanding of the net as possible, to obviate the need for them to believe our competitor, who preferred to take the easy way out and just sell at any cost with any claim it took. result is, three years after we started, some of my earliest clients , who used to call every week on one aspect or the other, are respected within their comoanies for their understanding of the net.

So the moral of the story is, donlt expect just hard work to take you places, as all the 100 most important guys of the century would have you believe.. Work hard, but make sure it gets noticed, even if you have to quit to make your point.