I have been laboring under a delusion.

You may have been as well. Especially if you are “of an age”.

I grew up in an era where you “worked hard and kept your nose clean”, one of my dad’s favorite saying.

And you know, it worked…for a time.

Then position and politics came into play. For others I saw (and fostered sadly) technology take over. Competition for positions increased and corporations, in many cases lost any loyalty to the employee.

In short the delusion I was working under was that this would get easier as I got older.

It haven’t. It has gotten progressively harder.

And I see this with just about everyone I talk to who is “of an age”.

If you are young this possibly has not yet hit your radar, or you are you are most likely working under a totally different model than I grew up under.

I had hoped to be “of an age” and begin to reap the rewards of a corporate life lived working both hard and smart. Maybe slow down a bit, travel a bit more (cause I finally have more vacation time now…LOL), begin to leverage my knowledge more and (proverbially) my hands less.

My wife is in the same boat, probably more so. She is a well respected teacher in her district but the volume of work necessary for her to “keep up” is just off the charts. She works more than anyone I know. And yes, even during the summer!

I think the main point is that the work world that I grew up in simply no longer exist. Technology, which was supposed to make our life easier, has only sped everything up. There is a demand for a business pace that keeps pace with technology. This because our competitors are innovating and we are not setting a pace for internal innovation, but for competitive innovation. Not that competitive innovation is anything new, but the pace of this innovation is new and ever increasing as technology allows for increases in said speed to innovate.

The worker is left, at all levels, to maintain an ever increasing pace. This, often, with fewer and fewer resources to do so. Because, technology replaces resources…right!?

Wrong!
Technology speeds the pace of innovation and lends itself to the company with enough of the right resources to move forward this pace rapidly. Thus, leaving everyone else behind struggling to match, much less keep ahead, of that pace.

Many companies are living under the old idea of technology replaces resources without understanding, necessarily, that as pace increases more resources are consumed.

The natural world proves this fact over and over again.

Yet, we had fooled ourselves into believing in a set of virtual physics that we can manipulate.

Physical physics can no longer compete with virtual physics, we now must work to video game like laws.

And you may not believe this is actually translating to the physical world but having been in technology for almost forty years now, I can assure you it is.

We model virtually and and are increasingly able to technologically translate that virtual model into the physical at a greater and greater pace. Need I remind you we now print in 3D. No one has time to actually allow someone to “craft” a new design. We CAD it and print it.

We in the physical world are left to maintain pace or be left behind.

We are left to work harder, smarter and faster to compete with our virtual counterparts.

While, and possibly rightfully so, this Brave New World is created for a new breed of worker the knowledge worker is playing a continual game of catch up.

The days of being able to slow down in one’s career as we get older and hope to use our strategic skills more than our tactical skills is effectively over.

We have given up grand war strategies for winning daily battles in life.