Dying By Comparison

Background Story

A decade ago I worked at a company that struggled to retain a data manager. They built their business around their data and the data manager became a key position as he led every data position at the company. However, all of the data managers they hired left in less than a year for other opportunities. The company tried increasing their pay. It failed. The company tried increasing their benefits. It failed. The company tried offering bigger bonuses. It failed. New manager after new manager would be hired only to leave in less than a year.

I asked one of the directors at the time why they didn't hire internally. I had previously noticed that their top database administrator left the company after working at the company for eight years. The director said that none of the internal talent was good enough to be a data manager - they wanted someone externally who knew how to lead a data team. What I observed was that the company had misunderstood their problem: they overvalued leadership experience for the position, but undervalued the knowledge of the company's data. Their internal talent would have made better data managers because they already knew the nuances of their data while the external talent left because they found the data environment frustrating due to all these nuances. The company consistently picked the devil they didn't know and they felt the result - none of the new managers stayed with their company.

The humorous part of this story is that after their top database administrator left the company, he was promoted to a data manager at a top USA bank.

Meet the Comparative Brain

The comparative brain doesn’t only exist in business, it exists in our personal life as well. When we think of the comparative brain, two idioms immediately pop into mind:

• It is better to go with the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.
• The grass isn’t greener on the other side of the fence.

Both of those idioms share a major misconception - comparison. We believe external talent is better than our internal talent partially because we know our internal talent. We think that another person will be more compatible with us in dating because we know the current person we're dating. We feel that life "out there" is better than our own life because we're living our own life.

The comparative brain often has us copy others even when it makes little or no sense. Like we see in the above short business story, we sometimes will jump to a solution in our business or personal life because it worked for others. The comparative brain results in a huge amount of lost time, energy and sometimes, money.

Solving the Comparative Brain

I wrote Dying By Comparison as a guide with exercises at the end of the chapter. If you have struggled with your comparative brain in business or in your personal life, this book was written to help you step through exercises over time that helps you overcome it. This book answers questions such as:

• What is a common influence we surround ourselves for relief that actually hurts us and how can we limit this damage?
• What are some costs to the wrong environment and how do we protect ourselves and our company from the damage?
• What happens when we don't know the season we're in and how do we learn to enhance our current season to build a better future for ourselves and our business?