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“The experience of the human race indicates strongly that the only person in abundant supply is the universal incompetent.”

Peter Drucker

What is “making it” in 2024? What I mean by that is in today’s flattened society making it isn’t some title or increased responsibility or even some version of social mobility, its more simply a zero-sum wealth concept. In other words, “I have more than they do” is making it. Please note that accumulation is not linked to competency; it is solely an outcome-based claim and objective.

That said. Years ago, I wrote a piece called the commoditization of competency where I outlined that optics were becoming more important than actual competence. But that issue, while it remains, has taken on some different characteristics in the current environment.

Which leads me to the redefinition of ‘making it.’

In the past a central belief of all Americans, in particular those of lower income and middle class, was that the son and daughter of a blue-collar worker could become a PhD in physics or even the president. At the same time there was a slightly naïve belief an irresponsible child of the most elite family in town could actually make mistakes from which they could never recover. I won’t suggest that both of these beliefs were completely myth because in reality every year we could find examples, within specific lives within specific communities, within which this occurred. Simplistically this is a social mobility and anti-caste narrative (with grains of truth). And while in the present it’s become obvious that both of these things are obviously less true, the larger issue begs the core question of mobility “to what.” And this is the core issue with regard to competence. Because competence is typically what undergirds upward mobility, i.e., one needs to gain significant competence to be able to gain significant upward mobility. But if the societal narrative is to question mobility in general then competence itself gets redefined because there is no longer an objective of getting ahead, but rather the objective is to simply get ‘what you deserve.’ And what you deserve is untethered to competence. While what I just said may sound a bit esoteric, it bears out in today’s world. The reality is in America today social mobility, if defined by more wealth, is alive and well. More people, of every generation, are earning more than their parents did. The issue is that wealth increase doesn’t equate to “upward mobility.” Its just in today’s world you can “make it” simply by getting wealthier. I would be remiss if I didn’t remind everyone of what John Kenneth Galbraith said “the link between intelligence and wealth is specious at best” and that is where upward mobility DOES matter. In the good ole days you actually had to gain competency to gain responsibility and that responsibility had increased wealth attached to it. That equation no longer exists. I can be a dumbass on YouTube spewing random opinions, and misinformation, and still make hundreds of thousands of dollars. There is no link between competency and “making it.”

Which leads me to competence.

In the past there was a solid belief that in the long run competence set limits as to what a person could become. If you wanted to play a professional sport you had to learn how to do that sport better than anybody else. If you didn’t do that, you could certainly be something else, but you could not be that. I use that as an example because in the past we believed this was a truth for all professions. If you wanted to be a lawyer, you went to a law school. If you wanted to go into business, you mastered maths, accounting, and the art of effective quick decisionmaking. We were also taught that the penalty for sliding through life without having mastered any competence was a sentence to mediocrity. This doesn’t mean that we always equated competence with formal education, although education was understood to undergird many of the competencies necessary for true upward mobility, because we understood car mechanics, craftspeople, service providers, and public service people like police and firemen, had certain competencies and always stood high in our value judgments. It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who pointed out “I admire people who know how to do things.” My point here is competence was always tied to being able to ‘do something’ with a high level of competence and that competence was valued in and of itself; not assessed a value based on some outcome.

Which leads me to the current competency crisis.

Doing has become a blurry amorphous assessment. What I mean by that is that in today’s short term vanity metrics world we tend to focus on some published measurement or metric. What this means is that we ignore the mechanics to achieve that measurement or metrics as well as we don’t even question whether that measurement or metric is actually valuable. This all matters because somebody could have multiple measurements and metrics posted on their resume and yet they actually have no specific competency. Or their competency is not a specific skill or even be competently smart. For example Einstein was seen as a genius with an extremely high competence in physics and mathematics. Elon Musk, on the other hand, is acknowledged by peers as neither the smartest nor having any specific strength in a skill; his only competence is having a vision. Bill Gates was also a visionary, but he also had incredible competence within the specific industry that he built his vision upon. This isn’t to pick on Elon Musk, this is simply to make a point. The world needs visionaries, but more importantly it needs competency because it is those with the competency who actually do the things to actually make it happen. And it’s probably my generation’s fault, at least in part, in that in the past we used to split people up into doers and thinkers. In doing so we diminished the doers as being lesser versions of thinkers. Ultimately it diminished competency by narrowing competency’s value.

Which leads me to “competency cynical.”

“In an organization which manages by drives, people either neglect their job to get on with the current drive or silently organized for collective sabotage of the drive in order to get their work done. In either event they become deaf to the cry of Wolf. And when the real crisis comes, when all hands should drop everything in pitch in, they treat it as just another case of Management created hysteria. Management by drive is a sure sign of confusion. Is an admission of incompetence. A sign that management does not think. Above all it is a sign that the company does not know what to expect of its managers and that not knowing how to direct them it misdirects them.”

Drucker in 1973

What I mean by this is we have just become cynical with regard to what competent actually is. Yeah. We have not only become cynical of experts, but cynical of the competent. We have, basically, become bad faith, uncharitable, people. Uncharitable in that we give every competent person a bad-faith view detailing out every possible exception to a truth about their competency (and its value) and putting disclaimers on everything, i.e., “it is possible (not probable) something is not true.” Competence dies a death of a thousand caveats. And if competence gets sliced to death, the only thing left alive is a hollow version of ‘making it.’ Making itbecomes more about style (and accumulation), less about substance (competence). I sometimes worry in today’s world where things become less and less concrete and tangible, we are placing our hopes and dreams on some dubious pedestals. Personally, I would feel much more comfortable placing my hopes and dreams on real competence. Ponder.

“I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?”

John Lennon