I’m in class a lot these days, and this week it happens to be Software Quality Engineering Institute classes (big fancy organization, huh). I’m still in Dallas, but I’m not at my desk.
In the middle of one of our discussions, our instructor Rex Black states something about a particular experience he’d had with a particularly bad testware vendor: “These folks were turning incompetence into a business opportunity.”
That’s a great quote when you think about it. How many corporations can you think of that do this? My top candidate: Kinko’s. Somebody screws up the 50 sets of notes for a class and you only discover it the day before. To whom can you turn to rectify the situation? That’s right–the oh, so helpful Kinkopeople.
Can you think of any other examples? Consultants are fair game, but they’re more in the turning ignorance into opportunity business.
Lopey,
I read once that 40% of the work in the world is done simply to repair mistakes that occur in the first 60%. This number sounds a bit low to me, I think that most of the world’s work is done to correct prior mistakes. without incompetence, millions, no billions, of people would have nothing to do. I also read in Wired that today it only takes 50 seconds a day to earn enough to feed yourself for the day, the rest is just gravy. It pays for clothes, houses, SUV’s, wars in the Middle East, etc. Looked at that way, if we didn’t have all these screw ups, and didn’t have this drive to fix them, we’d all simply relax and sleep all day, and humanity would never progress. Incompetence is the engine that drives mankind, I for one am all for increasing it for my fellow man’s benefit.
And there’s something wrong with relaxing and sleeping all day? 🙂