Tag Archives: competence

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of July 2025

People Will Be Competent and Hardworking – If We Let Them

Mismanagement Myths

During Apple’s rise, Microsoft was considered to be big, slow and incompetent. Its CEO, Steve Ballmer, had foolishly dismissed the iPhone and the company never seemed to gain traction in the mobile world. It launched weak products, such as the Zune music player and the Windows phone. Its failed acquisition of Nokia just seemed to add insult to injury.

Yet still even accounting for Ballmer’s mobile missteps, Microsoft’s business continued to perform well, growing its revenues at double digit rates and maintaining high margins. How can that be? Most of Microsoft’s revenues don’t come from the consumer categories that business journalists tend to cover, but in selling B2B products and services to CIOs. While everyone was focused on gadgets, it was building a monster business in the cloud.

When you look more closely, the clever pundits often miss the real story. Blockbuster didn’t ignore Netflix, but executed a viable strategy and still failed. Kodak didn’t ignore the market for digital cameras, in fact its EasyShare line were top sellers. Unfortunately, selling digital cameras couldn’t replace the profits from developing film. Yes, Xerox PARC failed to successfully market the PC, but its invention of the laser printer saved the company.

The reason why pundits tell the caricatures rather than the real stories is that imagining CEOs to be fools makes us feel better about ourselves. After all, if only foolish people get disrupted, then we—assuming we are not fools—should be okay. Unfortunately, that’s not how the world works. Being smart and working hard won’t save you.

Why Do Smart, Competent People Fail?

There are many reasons why smart, competent people fail. A very common one is a category error. For example, Steve Ballmer didn’t think anyone would pay $500 for a phone, but the iPhone wasn’t just a phone, it was an entirely new business model and ecosystem. People would not only pay for it differently (through their mobile plan), they would also use it very differently than earlier phones.

That opens up a very different set of issues. How do we know if we’re making a category error? We put things into categories for a reason, to understand their relations to other things. For example, a plate is something that goes on a table. But sometimes, such as the case with a commemorative plate, they go on a wall. So when does a plate become commemorative?

Other famous failures ran into similarly thorny issues. The CEO at Blockbuster, John Antioco, developed a viable strategy and executed well, but failed to gain alignment among important stakeholders. Kodak marketed digital cameras, but they weren’t nearly profitable enough to replace developing film. Xerox PARC was designed to build the “office of the future,” not to market consumer products like the Macintosh.

What at first might seem like CEOs asleep at the wheel actually exposes some very thorny issues. How much alignment do we need before pushing an important strategy forward? What do you do when your cash cow dies? When you shoot for the moon, how should you hedge your bets?

These are tough problems with no obvious solutions. But notice that when we assume that the leaders were competent, it forces us to think about them much more seriously and, hopefully, learn something useful.

Seeing Competence All Around Us

I was recently talking to my friend Bob Burg, co-author of the Go-Giver series, and something he said reminded me of a short Borges essay I’ve long admired, called Borges and I, in which the acclaimed author writes about the challenges of balancing a public persona with a private one. I brought it up during our conversation and promised to send it to him.

The whole essay is just two short paragraphs of Borges comparing himself, who drinks coffee and walks the streets of Buenos Aires, to the famous author who will live on in posterity. “Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things,” he wrote.

Unfortunately, in sending Bob the essay, I screwed up. Because it was so short, I didn’t send a link but copy-pasted the text into the body of the email and, carelessly, didn’t include the title or the author’s name, which made the whole thing impossible to understand. Most people would have just written it off as something stupid. Bob did something different.

Instead of imagining me a fool, he humbly wrote me back, apologized for his inability to understand the essay and asked if I could explain it to him, which gave me the opportunity to correct my mistake. In doing so he did both of us a service. He got the small benefit of reading an interesting essay and I got the enormous gift of being able to redeem myself.

When we assume those around us are competent—not stupid or lazy—we do far more than give them the opportunity to be their best selves. People who feel validated actually tend to perform better too.

We Are Always Wrong

We all like to imagine ourselves as heroes in our own story. Unlike others, we are witnesses to our internal process and get to observe our logic develop. So our thoughts makes perfect sense to us and it can be incredibly frustrating when others don’t see it as we do. Our inclination is to imagine them to be fools, simply incapable of grasping basic concepts.

That’s why pundits tend to tell such facile stories. Blockbuster wasn’t paying attention to Netflix. Kodak ignored digital photography. Xerox PARC invented breakthrough products, but neglected to market them. None of these stories are accurate, but it’s far easier to portray a failure as a silly blunder, than admit to ourselves how easily it could happen to us.

The hard truth is that we’re always wrong. Sometimes we’re off by a little and sometimes we’re off by a lot, but we’re always wrong. We succeed not by coming up with the “right” idea from the start, but by taking a Bayesian approach and becoming less wrong over time.

The best way to do that is to assume other people are smart, competent and hardworking. Lazy fools will make themselves obvious soon enough. But by seeking out intelligence and virtue, we are not only much more likely to find it, but also to identify and correct deficiencies in ourselves and our thinking.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pexels

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Building Competence Often More Important Than a Vision

Gandhi’s “Himalyan Miscalculation”

When Mahatma Gandhi returned to India in 1915, after more than two decades spent fighting for Indian rights in South Africa, he had a vision for the future of his country. His view, which he laid out in his book Hind Swaraj, was that the British were only able to rule because of Indian cooperation. If that cooperation were withheld, the British Raj would fall.

In 1919, when the British passed the repressive Rowlatt Acts, which gave the police the power to arrest anyone for any reason whatsoever, he saw an opportunity to make his vision a reality. He called for a nationwide campaign of civil disobedience, called a hartal, in which Indians would refuse to work or do business.

At first, it was a huge success and the country came to a standstill. But soon things spun wildly out of control and eventually led to the massacre at Amritsar, in which British soldiers left hundreds dead and more than a thousand wounded. He would later call the series of events his Himalayan Miscalculation and vowed never to repeat his mistake.

What Gandhi realized was that his vision was worthless without people trained in his Satyagraha philosophy and capable of implementing his methods. He began focusing his efforts on indoctrinating his followers and, a decade later, set out on the Salt March with only about 70 of his most disciplined disciples.

This time, he triumphed in what is remembered as his greatest victory. In the end, it wasn’t Gandhi’s vision, but what he learned along the way that made him a historic icon.

The Real Magic Behind Amazon’s 6-Page Memo

We tend to fetishize the habits of successful people. We probe for anomalies and, when we find something out of the ordinary, we praise it as not only for its originality, but consider it to be the source of success. There is no better example of this delusion than Jeff Bezos’s insistence on using six-page memos rather than PowerPoint in meetings at Amazon.

There are two parts to this myth. First is the aversion to PowerPoint, which most corporate professionals use, but few use well. Second, the novelty of a memo, structured in a particular way, as the basis for structuring a meeting. Put them together and you have a unique ritual which, given Amazon’s incredible success, has taken on legendary status.

But delve a little deeper and you find it’s not the memos themselves, but Amazon’s writing culture that makes the difference. When you look at the company, which thrives in such a variety of industries, there are a dizzying array of skills that need to be integrated to make it work smoothly. That doesn’t just happen by itself.

What Jeff Bezos has done is put an emphasis on communication skills, in general and writing in particular. Amazon executives, from the time they are hired, learn that the best way to get ahead in the company is to learn how to write with clarity and power. They hone that skill over the course of their careers and, if they are to succeed, must learn to excel at it.

Anyone can ban PowerPoint and mandate memos. Building top-notch communication skills across a massive enterprise, on the other hand, is not so easy.

The Real Genius Of Elon Musk

In 2007, an ambitious entrepreneur launched a new company with a compelling vision. Determined to drive the shift from fossil fuels to renewables, he would create an enterprise to bring electric cars to the masses. A master salesman, he was able to raise hundreds of millions of dollars as well as the endorsement of celebrities and famous politicians.

Yet the entrepreneur wasn’t Elon Musk and the company wasn’t Tesla. The young man’s name was Shai Agassi and his company, Better Place, failed miserably within a few years. Despite all of the glitz and glamour he was able to generate, the basic fact was that Agassi knew nothing about building cars or the economics of lithium-ion batteries.

Musk, on the other hand, did the opposite. He did not attempt to build a car for the masses, but rather for Silicon Valley millionaires who wouldn’t need to rely on a Tesla to bring the kids to soccer practice, but could use it to zoom around and show off to their friends. That gave Musk the opportunity to learn how to manufacture cars efficiently and effectively. In other words, to build competency.

When we have a big vision, we tend to want to search out the largest addressable market. Unfortunately, that is where you’ll find stiff competition and customers who are already fairly well-served. That’s why it’s almost always better to identify a hair-on-fire use case—something that a small subset of customers want or need so badly they almost literally have their hair on fire—and scale up from there.

As Steve Blank likes to put it, “no business plan survives first contact with a customer.” Every vision is wrong. Some are off by a little and some are off by a lot. But they’re all wrong in some way. The key to executing on a vision is by identifying vulnerabilities early on and then building the competencies to overcome them.

Why So Many Visions Become Delusions

When you look at the truly colossal business failures of the last 20 years, going back to Enron and LTCM at the beginning of the century to the “unicorns” of today, a common theme is the inability to make basic distinctions between visions and delusions. Delusions, like myths, always contain some kernel of truth, but dissipate when confronted with real world problems.

Also underlying these delusions is a mistrust of experts and the establishment. After all, if a fledgling venture has the right idea then, almost by definition, the establishment must have the wrong idea. As Sam Arbesman pointed out in The Half Life of Facts, what we know to be true changes all the time.

Yet that’s why we need experts. Not to give us answers, but to help us ask better questions. That’s how we can find flaws in our ideas and learn to ask better questions ourselves. Unfortunately recent evidence suggests that “founder culture” in Silicon Valley has gotten so out of hand that investors no longer ask hard questions for fear of getting cut out of deals. \

The time has come for us to retrench, much like Gerstner did a generation ago, and recommit ourselves to competence. Of course, every enterprise needs a vision, but a vision is meaningless without the ability to achieve it. That takes more than a lot of fancy talk, it requires the guts to see the world as it really is and still have the courage to try to change it.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog and previously appeared on Inc.com
— Image credits: Pexels