Your basic recipe
Know your place, peasants!

There is no equality

A CEO learns a very important lesson:

One of the big decisions that Calvin made when he founded Spill was to pay himself and his colleagues an equal salary.

"There were five people, and everyone was pretty much contributing the same," he says. "So we tried this experiment where we paid each of us an equal amount of money - regardless of experience, regardless of role. We wanted to challenge the traditional model of pay. We decided on £36,000 a year for everyone. We calculated that was a decent living wage for London."

That simple strategy doesn't work when one hires varied staff:

As Spill took off, Calvin recruited new staff such as a software developer, a salesperson and clerical workers - and decided to offer them all the same £36,000 salary. This is when the problems started.

The real world is ruled by the iron laws of supply and demand. You'll get a lot of clerks for $4,000 a month but almost no software developers.

Calvin eventually let go of the equality nonsense and now has pay grades. It's distressing that nobody in his social or professional circle convinced him that this was an extremely bad idea from the start. Well, at least, he learned.

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