Comparison is the ability to look outside of your own reality and put someone else’s reality in relation to yours. Managers think this practice is useful to gauge your performance and gain insight. But this practice is meant to stroke or punch your ego and fuel either stress or arrogance. It is an outside-inside thing to do. Because you send out your reality, compare it to the outside and then react to whatever insight you gain from it. It turns everything you do into a reaction. A reaction to something that is not born within you, and therefore lacks the necessary honesty to deliver an authentic and believable message of how you’re doing.
A company that is in the habit of constantly checking its surroundings, comparing itself to others, interpreting other companies’ activities as threats to its survival, is living from the outside in. It has either lost its true purpose or never had one. It has forgotten what it is about and turns into nothing more than a loud, anxious beast hungry for attention and revenue, drowned out by a crowd of other loud, anxious beasts hoping to meet their quota.
