Surprised to see nothing (did I overlook?) about: The People vs. The Project/Job: The title, and the lead sentence,
Some people seem to achieve orders of magnitudes more than others in the same job.
suggest the work focuses essentially on people’s performance, but already in the motivational examples
For instance, among companies funded by Y Combinator the top 0.5% account for more than ⅔ of the total market value; and among successful bestseller authors [wait, it’s their books, no?], the top 1% stay on the New York Times bestseller list more than 25 times longer than the median author in that group.
(emphasis and [] added by me)
I think I have not explicitly seen discussed whether at all it is the people, or more the exact project (the startup, the book(s)) they work on, that is the successful element, although the outcome is a sort of product of the two. Theoretically, in one (obviously wrong) extreme case: Maybe all Y-Combinator CEOs were similarly performing persons, but some of the startups simply are the right projects!
My gut feeling is that making this fundamental distinction explicit would make the discussion/analysis of performance more tractable.
Addendum:
Of course, you can say, book writers and scientists, startuppers, choose each time anew what next book and paper to write, etc., and this choice is part of their ‘performance’, so looking at their output’s performance is all there is. But this would be at max half-true in a more general sense of comparing the general capabilities of the persons, as there are very many drivers that lead persons to very specific high-level domains (of business, of book genres, etc.) and/or of very specific niches therein, and these may have at least as much to do with personal interest, haphazard personal history, etc.
Surprised to see nothing (did I overlook?) about: The People vs. The Project/Job: The title, and the lead sentence,
suggest the work focuses essentially on people’s performance, but already in the motivational examples
(emphasis and [] added by me)
I think I have not explicitly seen discussed whether at all it is the people, or more the exact project (the startup, the book(s)) they work on, that is the successful element, although the outcome is a sort of product of the two. Theoretically, in one (obviously wrong) extreme case: Maybe all Y-Combinator CEOs were similarly performing persons, but some of the startups simply are the right projects!
My gut feeling is that making this fundamental distinction explicit would make the discussion/analysis of performance more tractable.
Addendum:
Of course, you can say, book writers and scientists, startuppers, choose each time anew what next book and paper to write, etc., and this choice is part of their ‘performance’, so looking at their output’s performance is all there is. But this would be at max half-true in a more general sense of comparing the general capabilities of the persons, as there are very many drivers that lead persons to very specific high-level domains (of business, of book genres, etc.) and/or of very specific niches therein, and these may have at least as much to do with personal interest, haphazard personal history, etc.