Competence.

[I Robot]

Extract for Dave A's article on Competence:

The shortage that I think our nation is suffering from is far more sinister, debilitating and generally bad for medium to long term prospects than something as relatively uncomplicated as money. What we are desperately short of is competence. And it's starting to cost us dear.

Discuss this article here.

[duncan drennan]

I really enjoyed the article and decided to Digg It

If you want to expose this to millions of people get over there and Digg It right now! Let me know if you can't figure out how to

[Dave A]

I struggled to find it until I used the search tool with keyword competence.

Interesting site!

[entoserv]

I don't know about Digg - but this needs to get to our masters of rhetoric.

Is rhetoric a buzzword?

[duncan drennan]

Use this link to get straight through to it - come on let's see if we can Digg it enough to push it onto the landing pages!

http://digg.com/search?s=organizational+competence

Just click on the "digg it" link (just below the digg counter). You'll be presented with the option to login or register. Follow the registration process and viola!
____________

Guy Kawasaki had a post on his blog about using Digg to generate traffic. The post can be found here, http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/09/..._use_digg.html

Here’s a good example. This is my traffic log for the first few weeks of September. The spike of 37,366 page views on September 8th is purely because a blog posting appeared on the home page of Digg.

Sorry if I'm derailing this thread!!

You can also add "Digg this!" links to your site/blog/articles etc. As on Guy's blog. Seems like a good way to try to get some exposure - I'll be trying to set this up with my next blog posting and see what the results are.

[MarieAnnetta]

Poor Charlie's Almanack

I have been reading an instructive book called 'Poor Charlie's Almanack' written by Charlie Munger Vice-Chair of Berkshire. The book is filled with straight, down-the-line workable methodologies. ( I hate rambling tomes of unworkable theories, written by some professor who's only seen the end of his nose - never mind life in a company!)

Competence is a critical factor in Mr Munger's book and he berates those that love shoddiness.

The competent person feels at total peace. They know how to get the thing done - correctly and intelligently. Nice place to be I should think!

[adrianh]

The competent person feels at total peace.

So you are saying a competent person is the one that's high on dope.

They know how to get the thing done - correctly and intelligently.

Good one, then the rest of humanity, 99.99999% of us, who learn through our mistakes and succeed at failure, including Henry Ford & Thomas Edison are incompetent - great news, now I've just learned that we're all the same, except of course for the "competent people" who don't make 10,000 mistake and invent a light bulb!

eish....or as my daughter would say "joooo"

[Dave A]

Eish... Be gentle on the noobs

Although I'd hesitate to agree that competence necessarily brings a sense of peace. I've seen perfectly competent people stressed out of their minds.

There's no stress in not giving a damn...

[wynn]

There's no stress in not giving a damn...

I also like competence but you have to balance your expectations.

Also known as a 'low f^@k it threshold'

[tec0]

I am >>>

Competence, the quality of being adequately or well qualified physically and intellectually? No... Sorry a piece of paper cannot tell you if someone is qualified physically and intellectually. See today we have thousands of courses and the trick is you can go and do them but if you don’t use the information as in everyday you forget. “This has happened to me”

So a course will set you back R8000 for 7 days of training??? A certificate will set you back R16500 and you will only have the basics and 3 weeks behind your name. If you go to job-mail you will see experience requirements range from 2 to 5 years “active” experience... If nobody takes you on then how are you suppose to get that experience?

Back in 1965 to 1980 “give or take” Eskom used to run programs where a person with standard 6 could get training and on job training and the results was properly trained people that could do their jobs blindfolded. Today you need N3 to get you in and then you need a bunch of other stuff, not to mention that minorities cannot get in at Eskom at all.

So the mining industry train people but again the minimum is N2 and you must pass or you get kicked out. As an Apprentice you are not allowed overtime, union protection and you MUST pass every subject or face termination. Also you get paid almost nothing... You can’t even afford the books you need.

Honestly the problem is the requirements part of a job. Now again back in 1965 to 1980 “give or take” the military had little requirements and produced some of the best qualified people we have ever seen. Fact our qualifications were so high that other countries had to take note...

Today those systems are dead because of money... Fact businesses will soon pay massif amounts of money for “imported” skill and engineers wile our own people slips down the drain into a world of poverty and crime. In truth what else is left? Nothing...

If you lower the requirements and facilitate people to grow in your company you will have a loyal employees and you will have competent employees. But the truth is government made this a impossibility.

[MarieAnnetta]

Tec0, what you said is relevant to Competence. You take a person who is not academic, give him the basics and gradually bring him up to speed. He's paid a trainee salary until he qualifies. It's a system that worked for years
even in Rhodesia - the government-run institutions all had apprenticeships in place so that young non-academic people could enter training without 'O' levels.

If you were interested in computers, but weren't so hot in maths, you could study with the Rhodesia Railways to become a computer engineer. It was a long course because you studied at the technical college for 6 months then worked in the Railway's computer rooms, then back to college. Your college was sponsored by the RR and when you qualified, you worked for the RR for two or three years.

The method produced qualified men and women with solid practical experience who could competently operate in their environments.

Still on competence, have you read "A Message To Garcia" by Elbert Hubbard 1899? Google it and read it. When have to instill this message in all our staff and pay attention to it ourselves.

[tec0]

A lesion in words I am sure. Behold the woman/ man that works when the boss is away or at home. Behold the woman/ man that works hard no matter the hour of day. So poetic yet in a way lost. For workers have died at the whim of a foreman braving melted steel burning into skin and bone till 90% of them was nothing more than battered bone his lasts words “you killed me” The second worker may have been or may not have been dead on impact we will never know.

This foreman is to be reinstated his case disappeared. But still there is more than one story for I remember a boy that knew little about the dangers he had to brave. His boss if you will, order him to inspect valves. These where no ordinary valves for the pressure was immense and the temperature excessive. The boy and yes he was just a boy still young did his boss’s bidding and died for it. His skin melted to the bone his flesh burned white by this invisible horror.

Now people will state competence or incompetence, I blame the companies. They had the ability and recourses to make a simple 20 minute introduction video. Those 20 minutes could have saved 3 lives.

For the letter was indeed delivered without any questions asked. These are just 3 souls that did there bidding without question and for nothing more than a whim. Now I did not mention these happenings to win an argument or to invoke sympathy.

I wrote this to point that yes loyalty is important for success. I wrote this story to point out that even experience can fail. But above all I wrote this to point out that if Rowan was shot would his sacrifice be noted as it is now?

[murdock]

you got to ask yourself what ever happened to the old railway appy schools and durban electricity training centres etc...i visited my old appy training centre and was rather taken back...it looked like a mortury...no movement...when i finally found someone and asked what happened to the 250 + appys who use to frequent the centre daily...i was told there arent even 250 appys in the entire country at the moment...and we wonder why our service industry has gone to the dogs...(an insult to dogs)...if the goverment doesnt start putting money back into the training centres instead of their new cars and houses and buddies bank accounts...this country will keep going down hill until eventually we will become like all the other african countries in africa...call me a pesimist but quite honestly i cant see it getting any better any time soon.

every single day on the news or headlines in the newspaper there is some goverment official being named and shamed for his dodgy acts...

ever since the new goverment took over things and just deteriated...i dont know how long they can blame apparteheid...but i am sure they will use the race card for as long as they can get away with it...from a mechanical point of view we can be lucky the old goverment built such good power stations...water treatment works and had such a jacked up public work...because if it didnt we would be floating around in our own crap without electricity...and this is a fact...i was gona say i wonder what happened to the millions which where spent on these project...but we all know the answer to that question...just read the newspaper.

i noticed the other day they finally after 3 years cut the grass back on the side of the freeway or should i say from the middle of the freeway so now there are 2 lanes again...problem now is they should have rather left the grass long at least you couldnt see the piles of rubbish and stompies thrown from the pigs out their vehicles.

[AndyD]

hat happened to the 250 + appys who use to frequent the centre daily...i was told there arent even 250 appys in the entire country at the moment...

When it's fashionable to give across the board salary hikes regardless of ability and productivity the tradesmen who are competent and productive leave for pastures greener. The apprenticeship programs no longer make good financial sense.

If you pay people by their worth then the good guys will stay and train more good guys and so on the cycle goes. This is true across the board from engineers to nurses, from dentists to school teachers. If you don't pay them their worth the next time you take stock there's nothing left but dead wood.

[adrianh]

In a country where nurses and teachers strike & run amok, where school kids toi, toi, refuse to write exams and demand 25% given to them for free, where a policeman "accidentally" shoots a matric pupil dead during a school kid strike because he doesn't realize that bullets ricochet, where 9 kids are killed on the way to a school with no teachers - to be taken to a hospital with no nurses...

...you say the problem is that "people are not being paid their worth" and that is why people are not training appies....

Ooookkk, I think that the South African youth are lazy and stupid and I also think that the majority of adults are lazy and stupid. They want democracy with no responsibility, they want degrees and diplomas with no education, they want housing without paying for services, they want electricity but steal the cables, they want salary increases but less work, they want, they want, they demand....

The country is not training appies because the youth are too good to be trained, they want to walk into a job and earn R15K a month. They want a 51% share in a business that they didn't build and don't understand. How do you teach a man to fish if he wants a golden fishing pole, for you to bait the hook and then pull in the fish for him when it bites (while that same man is peeing in the river and selling the fishing tackle on the sly)

It's very simple, if they don't want to learn then they can stay at home - their parents have earned the democratic right for them to sit on their butts on a street corner and smoke dope rather than going to school and taking responsibility for their own lives.