Mike Lee wrote:
"Is incompetence usually a result of characterological or moral failings?"
I think it depends. Clearly those who have mental handicaps will be
incompetent at many different things. This is by no fault of their own.
Then there are those who are incompetent because they refuse to take
responsibiliy for their life; then there are the really nasty people who
are incompetent because it is easier to live off of other people than it
is to live by the merit of their own effort. In the last two instances I'd
say it is a moral failing.
"I think Ben Compton might agree with me that there is such a thing as
generalized incompetence, and that its roots are moral."
Yes I would.
[...snip by host...]
"If these people were a small subset of people I've known who suck at
their jobs, that would be one thing. But my observation is that most
people who suck at their jobs suck at everything."
There are only a few reasons anyone would suck at their job:
1- They took a job they weren't qualified for, and refuse to develop the
skills needed to perform well.
2- They're lazy and simply aren't interested in working hard.
3- They're living an unconscious life and are terrified that if they think
enough to become competent at their job that they'll come to realize how
screwed up their rest of their life is so they just bury their head in the
sand and continue to suck hard.
4- They're so numb that they don' even realize tha they're living an
unconscious life. They're just following routine.
Outside of the fact that these are moral issues, I think they make for a
mighty unhappy life. While I'm feel sorry for incompetent people, I do not
feel a need to rescue them or protect them from the result of their
choices.
"Perhaps incompetence could be redefined in this discussion as "being bad
at something that everyone has every right to expect you to be good at." "
I'll buy that definition.
There are a number of examples that demonstrate why it is important for
companies to employee very competent people (and hence do everything they
can to scare incompetent people away).
A year ago I had a flat tire, so I took my car to the shop to get it
fixed. When they put my tire back on the car they didn't screw all the lug
nuts on tightly. A few days later I'm cruising down the highway at 65 mph
and I hear this really loud, grating noise coming from the back left
wheel. I brake to slow down, and at 45 mph the tire fell off, and I
dropped to the road on my axle. You can imagine my surprise, and, once I
stopped and assessed the situation, you can imagine how angry I was. When
I went back to the place that had fixed my flat they denied they had done
anything wrong. My life, and that of my wife and children who were in the
car with me were threatened by a mechanics incompetence. After making a
bit of a stink they fixed the whole thing f or free. . .
Another example would be the competence required for a plane to fly from
one location to another. As I write this, I'm sitting in an airport
terminal in New York waiting for my flight to Boston. I'm assuming, when I
board the plane, that everyone who has anything to do with my flight is
competent. If any of those people makes a mistake, it could threatened the
life of all those on the plane.
As a final example I give a demonstration of what the damage incompetence
can cause. I have a client who is in the process of buying several new
businesses. The president of the company, the lawyers, accountants, and so
forth depend upon e-mail. It's critical to their business, especially at
this period of time. They also use document management, which is built
into the GroupWise product, to keep track of all their documents (legal
documents, spreadsheets, etc.). The company hires a new network
adminsitrator a while back. Last week he accidentally deleted the
president of the company from the network and from the e-mail system. All
his messages and documents disappeared. It's critical that he have access
to that information. So you can imagine the president is quite pissed. So
the network administrator calls me and asks what he can do. I tell him to
restore the system from a backup copy. The only problem is he had disabled
the backup process because he didn't understand how the software works.
Ooops. So I agree to go out the next day and see what I can do. When I get
there I find out the network administrator had also deleted the God
account from the computer, which is what is needed to make changes to the
system. He had frozen the system in time. There was nothing I could do.
Needless to say the president of the company is irate, and the lawyers and
accountants are in a world of hurt. The incompetenc of the network
administrator has cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars within
a matter of days. The cost is still climbing. And it has impeded with the
company's ability to smoothly move forward with the purchase of the other
companies.
Incompetence can have a far-reaching effect on companies. I think it's a
pretty good policy to chase incompetents away, and to do everything
possible to keep competent people.
-- Benjamin Compton DWS -- "The GroupWise Integration Experts" (617) 267-0044 ext. 16 E-Mail: bcompton@emailsolutions.com http://www.emailsolutions.comLearning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>