5.
Competence: If you build it,
they will come
Benjamin
Franklin was held up as a model of competence.
His putting plaster into a field to convince his neighbours about
plaster making grains and grasses grow better was cited as an example of
Franklin’s competence. Maxwell believed in five points to flesh out competency:
show up every day, keep improving, follow through with excellence, accomplish
more than expected and inspire others.
Maxwell rounded off this chapter by asking “When was the last time you
gave a task your absolute best even though nobody but you would know about it?”
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Webster’s
definition
a
sufficiency of means for the necessities and conveniences of life
=========================================================
My
thoughts
Benjamin
Franklin was no doubt an extraordinary man of great capability. Maxwell devoted two pages and two lines to
illustrate Franklin’s competence.
However, I would venture to suggest that “capable” would be a better
description of Franklin. Two pages and
two lines later, I am doubtless Franklin was a capable man, but Maxwell’s
narration did not bring out the “compentency” of Franklin. And neither could I find a matching
definition of competence in Webster to Maxwell’s narration. This book was published in 1999. Has the usage of competence changed since
then? I’ve only heard people using
“competence” to describe people who handle their roles well. Frankly, Maxwell totally lost me on this
chapter. Maxwell’s tips in this chapter
are genuinely useful, but they are simply not in sync with achieving
competency.
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