There are 10 to 1 differences in productivity between companies within the same industries.
Steve McConnell, Software Developer
Let’s look at paradigms again. Paradigms are defined in terms of a game. A game has a set of rules, which participants must follow. The game often has boundaries such as a racquetball court, baseball park, or tennis court.
The game also requires specific skills to compete. A professional baseball player runs bases; hits a curveball, fastball, slider, and fields a ball. Players keep score. The game score defines winners and losers.
This is the challenge: work, career, and job success requires new personal practices to succeed because the complexity of business has increased.
If your individual practices are out of date, then sooner or later you’re going to lose your marketability. As business and life become more complex, all of us are losing our ability to keep up. The growing distance between the complexity of work and our present work practices results in tension, dysfunction, and sometimes fear. If your present practices diverge too much from what’s going on around you, it will eventually affect your happiness and even your sanity.
Life Lesson Earned: You need to reinvent yourself yearly. You need to invent new ways of working and develop new practices. To succeed, you must manage your customer, time, quality, communications, risk, technology, and performance commitments. And, the challenge is you have to do this on your own time.