"In the face of change, the competent are helpless."

http://www.fastcompany.com/node/38442/print

by robg • 18 years ago

60 35 18 years ago

sanj• 18 years ago

I really want to like this article. Partly because I'd like to believe I fall into the (appropriately) incompetent bucket.

But it seems to me that I might have a lot of company in there with a large group of people that simply can't get anything done. And so drop projects before they're complete and "zoom" off to the next thing.

akkartik• 18 years ago

Hear, hear. Incompetence may be necessary, but it isn't sufficient.

swombat• 18 years ago

Sadly, Wall Street has traditionally rewarded companies for being competent.

Welllllll.. I guess it's a good thing they hired lots of incompetent senior executives in the last decade, that should bring in plenty of interesting change as they bypass the 'competent' processes and try out new things!

PS: More seriously, I don't buy this one-dimensional definition of competence. I think you can be competent and innovative at the same time - I think I am. I don't think you can reduce risks to near-zero and be innovative at the same time, of course, but I don't think "not failing" is a necessary element of "competence".

jongalt• 18 years ago

Uhh... I don't think that word means what you think it means.

If you replace 'competent' with 'reliable', the article reads a lot better. But I still pretty much completely disagree with everything he's saying.

noonespecial• 18 years ago

Yeah. That's what I kept thinking the entire time I was reading this. Overloading competent with this extra meaning was mildly uncomfortable. Rigid, process oriented, (and only sometimes reliable because of those things) would have been better. Blindly trusting process is like fake competence, a plastic, cartoon version of the real thing.

Real competence is the ability to deal gracefully with exactly the kind of change the article talks about.

ojbyrne• 18 years ago

I've always used the word "professional." I think it captures it better.

netcan• 18 years ago

That's the point of the article. He isn't bundling it in with the word. He's bundling it in with the concept.

What he is saying is that 'competence' as defined by those defining it, is tied to process oriented reliability. That that is where competence comes from. You can disagree with that if you want, but it's not overloading the word with extra meaning it's claiming a relationship.

mrtron2• 18 years ago

http://aplaplaclizame.files.wordpress.com/2007/08/inigo.jpg

mhartl• 18 years ago

Indeed. This article is an abuse of language writ large. In addition to abusing "competent", it's also abusing "incompetent" to dubious effect. Replace "incompetent" with its synonym "unskilled" and watch the argument implode.

projectileboy• 18 years ago

Hmm. Seems to me that Toyota is doing pretty well being "competent" by his definition.

coglethorpe• 18 years ago

"Not so long ago, companies were filled with incompetent workers."

Seth, please come and visit the company I work for. You will find little has changed.

t0pj• 18 years ago

To summarize: Be ready. Shift happens.

This makes a lot of people uneasy.

mrtron2• 18 years ago

To summarize:

Shit happens.

edw5192• 18 years ago

They confuse speed with velocity.

We really enjoy your teachings about marketing Seth, just as long as we don't have to repeal Newton's laws to understand them.

fallentimes2• 18 years ago

The worst part is: the entire article is such an abortion you could do this with what feels like every other line. It's filled with marketing non sense, truisms, conventional "wisdom", wrong definitions and outright lies. It's almost impressive, really.

Alex3917• 18 years ago

How is this sentence wrong? Speed and velocity are two different concepts, and Seth's usage is perfectly cromulent.

sabat3• 18 years ago

It's cromulent but I think it needs to be embiggened.

edw5192• 18 years ago

Spoken like a cunning linguist.

comatose_kid• 18 years ago

Well, speed is a scalar and velocity is a vector. So I think he's saying 'going fast without direction: not so good.'

sabat3• 18 years ago

When corporations succeed, it's usually in spite of themselves.

BTW, Seth, being a contrarian doesn't automatically make you brilliant.

fallentimes2• 18 years ago

That was one of the worst, most ill informed articles I've read this month (hey, I read a lot). And the only reason I read it at all was because it was on HN, which was unfortunately due to linkbait trickery.

Edit: I just realized it was written by Seth Godin. Now it all makes sense.

helveticaman• 18 years ago

How does Seth Godin keep making the front page? I guess this validates him as a marketer. He's not at all impressive (in my eyes) but I suppose he markets what little he has amazingly well. See http://xkcd.com/125/.

unalone3• 18 years ago

It's because he writes short articles that usually make sense on the surface and so people read him because they think it will make them rich.

tcskeptic• 18 years ago

My experience from a decade in manufacturing is that people and copmanies can also be "competent" (using it in the sense of this article) at the process of improvement. That is to say not only do they have reliable, repeatable processes for the tasks they do every day, they also have reliable repeatable processes for improving those things. Using the example from the article, if the contractor was also competent at the improvement process, they would have the ability to experiment in a controlled way with new ways of doing things, and a repeatable process to apply lessons learned from those experiments to ensure that the next time they attempt something they improve on it.

Being competent DOES NOT mean you have to be hidebound.

MaysonL• 18 years ago

Yes. Give a man a fish - feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish - he can eat till the river runs dry or gets fished out. But if a man learns how to learn to fish, he can learn to do anything.

nsimpson• 18 years ago

You have to take into consideration the author is a sales guy and not an operations guy. The problem for a sales guy is, "how do I get my prospective customer to take a risk and shake things up by buying my product?"

An operations guy would read it a lot differently, because it seems to be implying that you have to choose between predictability and innovation.

As any operations guy knows, the reason Toyota etc. are consistent and innovative is because they have gradual continuous improvement throughout the company, led from the bottom-up by the employees themselves.

As you can see, Seth has heard of the term "Six Sigma", but I'm not entirely sure he knows what it means. Not his fault, I wouldn't ask Deming for sales advice either.

At the end of the day what I took from it is the old message: "what made you successful in the past is not guaranteed to make you successful in the future", and a lot of people and companies have trouble letting go and trying something new.

sdurkin• 18 years ago

"Every situation has a silver lining, and mine was that I got a big insight into what competence is. Competent people have a predictable, reliable process for solving a particular set of problems. They solve a problem the same way, every time. That's what makes them reliable. That's what makes them competent."

Totally, completely, and incontrovertibly false. People who are competent are those that are effective at solving new problems as they arise.

Don't believe me? Ask yourself, what makes a competent programmer?

Your measure of competence is simply wrong. Reputation != competence, and its a terrible heuristic, especially when dealing with contractors.

aptimpropriety• 18 years ago

Reading that made my frustration with the "New Facebook Complaint-army" grow even more.

A new GUI that I don't know instinctively like the back of my hand? Definitely sucks.

sabat3• 18 years ago

If I ever met Seth face-to-face, I think I'd grab him by the shoulders and tell him, "Oh, blogga, PLEASE."

Elepsis• 18 years ago

"Seth Godin is permission-marketing yahoo! at Yahoo!"

Wait, what? Since when does Seth Godin work for Yahoo? Did I just miss a memo?

dangoldin• 18 years ago

The article is dated December 19, 2007

sfk• 18 years ago

Competent people are perpetually looking for change and new ways to express themselves. However, they are looking for meaningful change, not for the kind of pseudo-change that marketing buffoons like Seth Godin thrive on.

"In the face of change, the competent are helpless."

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