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Peter Principle...?

© Stuart Bourhill

Having been President & COO of a VC-backed software company for the past 11 months, I found myself on the street for the first time in my career. We fought an extremely hard battle, in fact the company survives, albeit with a significantly reduced burn-rate; leaving a core technical team, a controller, sales person and marketing team. The climate called for us to extend cash from January 2002 to June 2002 - to allow the company's revenues to increase and for the financial markets to return to some state of normalcy. I think both of these circumstances will occur and the company will be a huge success!

In logging this experience, self-doubt can come into play. Visions of the Peter Principle (rising to one's level of incompetence) can be heard in the stark halls of high-tech executive re-engineering. My philosophy however is "ONWARD"; limiting the time to look back to the sole purpose of gaining a list of lessons learned, burning those into memory, and moving forward to my next adventure. We are all on individual paths, some staight, some bending; the bottom line is to achieve our own personal form of self-actualization.

None of us really knows what lies beyond the next bend in the river; therefore, use your tough times as fodder for the good times, seek a higher purpose, and "get up off the couch" of misery. Life is much, much too short for anything else!

Success lies in your next step(s)!

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