case for incompetence

To figure out what jobs are the most necessary and which are not, one simply has to answer this question: when a position is vacated either by a resignation, a retirement, a death, an insanity plea, season ticket considerations or enlightenment how long does it take to fill it? A large company was once without a CEO for nearly a year. What does that tell you? But if a courier, the lowest rung on our corporate ladder, calls in sick wild pandemonium ensues for the better part of the day. If two couriers call in sick management begins considering its options: a two-instead of one-pack day, Monster.com, a death in the family and/or the phrase, spoken loudly, "I don't care how, just do it!" That last one really works well.

Incompetence, however, can solve problems like this. If an incompetent employee calls in sick, who cares? What did they do at work? They drank coffee, they used the phone, they surfed the net, they wrote memos and organized meetings. Is anybody going to miss that? Similarly, if an incompetent employee leaves. What happens? Nothing. The same thing that happened when they were there. Business moves on as usual. No one has to adjust, nothing changes, another incompetent person moves into the position, nothing gets done again and everyone is happy.

Competence, in reality, is a big problem. Admittedly, it is a rare occurrence, but when it happens it can be devastating. Competent individuals are capable of making themselves necessary even in unnecessary positions. So if they leave or get sick they leave a huge gap where none existed before and the chances of finding another competent individual to fill that gap are very slim.

Another problem is no one has much experience with competence, hence bosses are never really quite sure what to do with competent workers. If they tell them to do something, not only might they actually do it, but they often do it well and on time. This makes everyone else feel inferior and this is startlingly bad for company morale. If morale is low, productivity is low, the bottom-line suffers, managers get stressed, upper-management not knowing what else to do starts making decisions, stock prices drop, stockholders start selling and before anyone has time to react the company relocates to China. The only one able to find another decent job is the competent S.O.B. who started the disaster in the first place.

The lesson in all this is simple: hire incompetent people. By doing this, sick calls, retirements, resignations and firings will all cease to be traumatic and the workplace can maintain the benign consistency that makes status quo the mantra of our time.