The Carrot Principle – Book ReviewThe Carrot Principle is a book about motivating your employees through positive consequences. This book has a lot of interesting thoughts and ideas. The whole idea behind “The Carrot Principle” is to spark motivation and enthusiasm in your employees. A manager achieves this through recognition.
The book begins with the story of Charles Goodyear and his failures that eventually led to his success in designing the prototype for rubber. The authors use this story to catching everyones attention and to bring them into their theory of management rewards to stimulate employee participation. They then go on to break down leadership into four basic areas: Goal setting, communication, trust, and accountability. All managers need to be proficient at these things in order to succeed at their job. What does a manager use to set himself apart from the rest of the managers out there? Recognition. Recognition comes in many different ways and often does not require anything monetarily. It does not matter how big or small your company is, you will always have a higher success rate when you use recognition (known as the carrot principle). The authors prove this statement with several graphs and case studies in their book.
The Benefits of Recognition in Customer Success In an example of a company that doesn’t need the carrot principle, we may think twice about using customer recognition to promote the customer. I’ve always thought of recognition as a tool that can help promote and encourage trust in our members, yet the benefits of this concept don’t involve any monetarily. That’s because we don’t need it for any purposes. To illustrate, imagine your group of customers are starting out a new business and you know that you can drive sales and a few thousand dollars in profit. What’s your business doing with these customers? The result will probably be a lot of other products and services that you can use to show how you can improve their level of customer service! After you’ve shown your customers how you can achieve their goals, you’ll get a pretty good deal and they’ll go right back to using your customer relationship as a marketing tool. This makes it easy to recruit, engage, and then use in your business. If the company thinks this is the most compelling use of business, then by all means, use it! Yet how? By using recognition as a tool that gives customers some kind of insight into their customer experience. And it is the kind of insight they make. For example, when evaluating a new business you might wonder whether you could sell more products that would better sell their users and would deliver more value to the consumer. Instead, we’ve learned to use recognition as a tool for helping customers learn more about our business while they’re actively using it to better understand our marketing efforts. It will help them learn about our mission goals and what they value in order to get better at their goals and then go from there. The reason we use customers is to help them learn about our business and what they want from it. It’s the best way they can learn more about our product so that they can take advantage of what they’re learning, and to find creative ways of using our product. This is not to say that recognition is useless; it’s just that some people have different needs—and many companies have other uses for recognition. As much as you might like to say that I’m not saying I need any sort of recognition to succeed in his or her company, you shouldn’t. And remember, the only way to succeed is for your customers and not for you.
The Benefits of Recognition in Customer Success In an example of a company that doesn’t need the carrot principle, we may think twice about using customer recognition to promote the customer. I’ve always thought of recognition as a tool that can help promote and encourage trust in our members, yet the benefits of this concept don’t involve any monetarily. That’s because we don’t need it for any purposes. To illustrate, imagine your group of customers are starting out a new business and you know that you can drive sales and a few thousand dollars in profit. What’s your business doing with these customers? The result will probably be a lot of other products and services that you can use to show how you can improve their level of customer service! After you’ve shown your customers how you can achieve their goals, you’ll get a pretty good deal and they’ll go right back to using your customer relationship as a marketing tool. This makes it easy to recruit, engage, and then use in your business. If the company thinks this is the most compelling use of business, then by all means, use it! Yet how? By using recognition as a tool that gives customers some kind of insight into their customer experience. And it is the kind of insight they make. For example, when evaluating a new business you might wonder whether you could sell more products that would better sell their users and would deliver more value to the consumer. Instead, we’ve learned to use recognition as a tool for helping customers learn more about our business while they’re actively using it to better understand our marketing efforts. It will help them learn about our mission goals and what they value in order to get better at their goals and then go from there. The reason we use customers is to help them learn about our business and what they want from it. It’s the best way they can learn more about our product so that they can take advantage of what they’re learning, and to find creative ways of using our product. This is not to say that recognition is useless; it’s just that some people have different needs—and many companies have other uses for recognition. As much as you might like to say that I’m not saying I need any sort of recognition to succeed in his or her company, you shouldn’t. And remember, the only way to succeed is for your customers and not for you.
Three main points:1. Being an AcceleratorThe authors begin this book by writing about Charles Goodyear and his experimentation with rubber. At first I was not sure as to why they were talking about a single mans success with rubber. The focal point of this story was not really Charles Goodyear. The focal point of the story was the fire that made rubber possible. Fire was the “accelerant” ingredient needed in order to create our beloved rubber. Just like an accelerant was needed to create rubber an accelerant is needed to create a successful business. Managers who are accelerators are those that recognize their employees and help them reach goals and excel at their jobs. I have recently received a fantastic job as a Human Resource Assistant. I had no prior experience so I did not believe that I would get the job. However, during my interview I told my boss to be that my goal was to work in Human Resources and eventually become a manager. That statement is what got me that job. My boss want to help me reach my goals. She is someone that I would classify as an accelerator. Knowing that she wants me to succeed causes me to want to work harder for her and to achieve the goals she has for the company. My boss wants to help me move up in the company which makes me want to better the company in any way that I can. I found it very interesting to be reading this book all around the time that I got this job. It all makes a lot of sense. Accelerators make a big difference in the business world. My boss was transferred into this position just a few months before I was hired. The other lady in the office says she is much different than