Second topic that I want to talk about around staffing and focus on in this segment is internal mobility. So once we've hired people, it's not the end of the story for staffing. A lot of people move jobs inside the organization. Figuring out how we can optimize that process and make sure we get the right people into the right jobs. Is somewhere else where analytics can help. And kind of a motivating idea for this is getting beyond the Peter Principle. So I don't know if many of you are familiar with the Peter Principle. So, one statement of it is, in time, every post in an organization is occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties. Sometimes also summarized as people rise to the level of their own incompetence. It's kind of a cynical idea, delightfully cynical. But it's actually an intriguing theory behind it and the basic idea is in most organizations what gets you promoted is how well you perform. And so people who do well in their jobs eventually will get promoted out of them. Now, in an organization that isn't aggressive about moving underperformers out. What, eventually, that means, is people will keep getting promoted until they hit a job that they can't do. And then they're not gonna get promoted out of that job, and they're gonna stay in it, as well. And as Peter and his co-author, Hull said, consequence of that is ultimately, we end up in organizations that are largely staffed with people, who've risen to a level within a job they can't actually do. So, it's not clear that this really describes most organizations, but I probably won't share it with your boss anyway. Nonetheless, it carries kind of a grain of an interesting question, which is to what extent does success in a current job actually predict performance in the next job? Should we be screening just for are you good at your current job when we think about who to promote? Or another way of thinking about this is what does predicts success in higher level jobs? Should we just be thinking about are you good at your job? Or should we be looking at other things as well? I think this is not an easy thing to actually look at in many organizations. The reason for this is that in most organizations, you often don't know a lot about people's performance in their jobs, at least at the level at which you can kind of put it down into a systematic form and analyze it. You have a performance evaluation that says they're a high performer, they're middle of the road, or they're a low performer. What you really want to be able to do is more detailed data on how they're performing across multiple dimensions. So you do see that in some jobs. Like I said, if you're in a call center, for example, there's usually a wide variety of information about kind of your efficiency, your quality, your availability, all of those sorts of things. Sales, jobs, you can see quite a lot about the different kinds of sales you're making. These days I think in a lot of jobs we'll begin seeing more and more data being collected automatically. They enable us to see how people are doing on varied things. Another way that you might have varied data on your people is where people rated on various competencies in the organization. You wanna be a little careful with that, certainly, when I've looked at that data, what tends to happen is that high flyers get rated as high on pretty much everything and low performers get rated as low on pretty much everything. So how well that competence they'd really tracks variation in individual competence? I think it's more of question. But you can also have formal assessments done on them that really try and individually look at these different competences. The idea is if you could rate people on various dimensions of their performance inside the organization. Then what you could do is look at whether or not that performance predicts how they would do at the next level. And more specifically, which dimensions of their current performance predict whether they are going to be a high performer in a high level job. Alan Benson at the University of Minnesota and his colleagues did a very nice study on this looking at data on sales people. They had data on how the sales people did and also on the ones that became sales managers, how they did. As they could look at both what predicted whether or not people got promoted and also what predicted the performance of the managers once they became managers. And they found some evidence there. You get promoted by being the best sells person. But the best sales managers were good at selling, but they were also very good at team sales and sales that spread credit across their team. Because to be a good manager you need to be a team person there. And so it really looked like the way people were being promoted was not entirely consistent with who's gonna be the best manager. And it's likely that's a feature of many organizations. So getting better understanding what makes people best in the high level jobs and how we can use that to promote people, not just on their current performance but on their potential would benefit many organizations.