Competency Framework Quotes

the neoliberal project focused on designing institutions—not to liberate markets but to encase them, to inoculate capitalism against the threat of democracy, to create a framework to contain often-irrational human behavior, and to reorder the world after empire as a space of competing states in which borders fulfill a necessary function.

Two men for example, of precisely the same physical age, of precisely the same physical condition, will be in completely different states of mind, of competence, of effectiveness and of strength, as a direct result of their inner beliefs as to their relative freedom within the framework of the physical system in which they exist. The man who does not realize his basic independence from the physical system will not have the same freedom within it.

Great leadership has more to do with character, courage, and conviction than it does with specific skills or competencies.

If you’re not confused, you’re not paying attention.

we are in one of those great historical periods that occur every 200 or 300 years when people don’t understand the world anymore, and the past is not sufficient to explain the future

For example, in order to identify these schemas or clarify faulty relational expectations, therapists working from an object relations, attachment, or cognitive behavioral framework often ask themselves (and their clients) questions like these: 1. What does the client tend to want from me or others? (For example, clients who repeatedly were ignored, dismissed, or even rejected might wish to be responded to emotionally, reached out to when they have a problem, or to be taken seriously when they express a concern.) 2. What does the client usually expect from others? (Different clients might expect others to diminish or compete with them, to take advantage and try to exploit them, or to admire and idealize them as special.) 3. What is the client’s experience of self in relationship to others? (For example, they might think of themselves as being unimportant or unwanted, burdensome to others, or responsible for handling everything.) 4. What are the emotional reactions that keep recurring? (In relationships, the client may repeatedly find himself feeling insecure or worried, self-conscious or ashamed, or—for those who have enjoyed better developmental experiences—perhaps confident and appreciated.) 5. As a result of these core beliefs, what are the client’s interpersonal strategies for coping with his relational problems? (Common strategies include seeking approval or trying to please others, complying and going along with what others want them to do, emotionally disengaging or physically withdrawing from others, or trying to dominate others through intimidation or control others via criticism and disapproval.) 6. Finally, what kind of reactions do these interpersonal styles tend to elicit from the therapist and others? (For example, when interacting together, others often may feel boredom, disinterest, or irritation; a press to rescue or take care of them in some way; or a helpless feeling that no matter how hard we try, whatever we do to help disappoints them and fails to meet their need.)

My concern with democracy is highly specific. It begins in observing the remarkable fact that, while democracy means a government accountable to the electorate, our rulers now make us accountable to them. Most Western governments hate me smoking, or eating the wrong kind of food, or hunting foxes, or drinking too much, and these are merely the surface disapprovals, the ones that provoke legislation or public campaigns. We also borrow too much money for our personal pleasures, and many of us are very bad parents. Ministers of state have been known to instruct us in elementary matters, such as the importance of reading stories to our children. Again, many of us have unsound views about people of other races, cultures, or religions, and the distribution of our friends does not always correspond, as governments think that it ought, to the cultural diversity of our society. We must face up to the grim fact that the rulers we elect are losing patience with us. No philosopher can contemplate this interesting situation without beginning to reflect on what it can mean. The gap between political realities and their public face is so great that the term “paradox” tends to crop up from sentence to sentence. Our rulers are theoretically “our” representatives, but they are busy turning us into the instruments of the projects they keep dreaming up. The business of governments, one might think, is to supply the framework of law within which we may pursue happiness on our own account. Instead, we are constantly being summoned to reform ourselves. Debt, intemperance, and incompetence in rearing our children are no doubt regrettable, but they are vices, and left alone, they will soon lead to the pain that corrects. Life is a better teacher of virtue than politicians, and most sensible governments in the past left moral faults to the churches. But democratic citizenship in the twenty-first century means receiving a stream of improving “messages” from politicians. Some may forgive these intrusions because they are so well intentioned. Who would defend prejudice, debt, or excessive drinking? The point, however, is that our rulers have no business telling us how to live. They are tiresome enough in their exercise of authority—they are intolerable when they mount the pulpit. Nor should we be in any doubt that nationalizing the moral life is the first step towards totalitarianism. We might perhaps be more tolerant of rulers turning preachers if they were moral giants. But what citizen looks at the government today thinking how wise and virtuous it is? Public respect for politicians has long been declining, even as the population at large has been seduced into demanding political solutions to social problems. To demand help from officials we rather despise argues for a notable lack of logic in the demos. The statesmen of eras past have been replaced by a set of barely competent social workers eager to take over the risks of our everyday life. The electorates of earlier times would have responded to politicians seeking to bribe us with such promises with derision. Today, the demos votes for them.

Learning how to do psychotherapy is a complex process, much of which is transacted in the relationship between the beginning therapists and experienced supervisors. When the beginning therapists encounter problems that are beyond their range of experience, the supervisors usually assist in several ways. First, the supervisors offer an intellectual framework in which to understand the problem. References to the professional literature are often suggested. Second, the supervisors offer practical, problem-solving help with the strategies of therapy. Third and most important, the supervisors help the less experienced therapists to deal with feelings of their own that have been evoked by the patients. With the support of competent supervisors, the therapists are usually able to master their own troubled feelings and put them in perspective. This done, the therapists are better able to attend to patients with empathy, and with a confidence in their ability to offer help.

Universities are turning out highly skilled barbarians because we don’t provide a framework of values to young people, who more and more are searching for it. – Steven Muller, President, Johns Hopkins University True education is training of both the head and the heart. It is better to be uneducated than ill-educated. An uneducated thief may steal goods from the train but an educated one may steal the entire train. We need to compete for knowledge and wisdom, not for grades. Knowledge is piling up facts, wisdom is simplifying them. One could have good grades and a degree and still not learn much. The most important thing one can learn is to ‘learn to learn’. People confuse education with the ability to memorise facts. Educating the mind without morals creates a menace in society.

Hamilton was that rare revolutionary: a master administrator and as competent a public servant as American politics would ever produce. One historian has written, “Hamilton was an administrative genius” who “assumed an influence in Washington’s cabinet which is unmatched in the annals of the American cabinet system.”73 The position demanded both a thinker and a doer, a skilled executive and a political theorist, a system builder who could devise interrelated policies. It also demanded someone who could build an institutional framework consistent with constitutional principles. Virtually every program that Hamilton put together raised fundamental constitutional issues, so that his legal training and work on The Federalist enabled him to craft the efficient machinery of government while expounding its theoretical underpinnings.

The Seventh Central Pay Commission was appointed in February 2014 by the Government of India (Ministry of Finance) under the Chairmanship of Justice Ashok Kumar Mathur. The Commission has been given 18 months to make its recommendations. The terms of reference of the Commission are as follows:  1. To examine, review, evolve and recommend changes that are desirable and feasible regarding the principles that should govern the emoluments structure including pay, allowances and other facilities/benefits, in cash or kind, having regard to rationalisation and simplification therein as well as the specialised needs of various departments, agencies and services, in respect of the following categories of employees:-  (i) Central Government employees—industrial and non-industrial; (ii) Personnel belonging to the All India Services; (iii) Personnel of the Union Territories; (iv) Officers and employees of the Indian Audit and Accounts Department; (v) Members of the regulatory bodies (excluding the RBI) set up under the Acts of Parliament; and (vi) Officers and employees of the Supreme Court.   2. To examine, review, evolve and recommend changes that are desirable and feasible regarding the principles that should govern the emoluments structure, concessions and facilities/benefits, in cash or kind, as well as the retirement benefits of the personnel belonging to the Defence Forces, having regard to the historical and traditional parties, with due emphasis on the aspects unique to these personnel.   3. To work out the framework for an emoluments structure linked with the need to attract the most suitable talent to government service, promote efficiency, accountability and responsibility in the work culture, and foster excellence in the public governance system to respond to the complex challenges of modern administration and the rapid political, social, economic and technological changes, with due regard to expectations of stakeholders, and to recommend appropriate training and capacity building through a competency based framework.   4. To examine the existing schemes of payment of bonus, keeping in view, inter-alia, its bearing upon performance and productivity and make recommendations on the general principles, financial parameters and conditions for an appropriate incentive scheme to reward excellence in productivity, performance and integrity.   5. To review the variety of existing allowances presently available to employees in addition to pay and suggest their rationalisation and simplification with a view to ensuring that the pay structure is so designed as to take these into account.   6. To examine the principles which should govern the structure of pension and other retirement benefits, including revision of pension in the case of employees who have retired prior to the date of effect of these recommendations, keeping in view that retirement benefits of all Central Government employees appointed on and after 01.01.2004 are covered by the New Pension Scheme (NPS).   7. To make recommendations on the above, keeping in view:  (i) the economic conditions in the country and the need for fiscal prudence; (ii) the need to ensure that adequate resources are available for developmental expenditures and welfare measures; (iii) the likely impact of the recommendations on the finances of the state governments, which usually adopt the recommendations with some modifications; (iv) the prevailing emolument structure and retirement benefits available to employees of Central Public Sector Undertakings; and (v) the best global practices and their adaptability and relevance in Indian conditions.   8. To recommend the date of effect of its recommendations on all the above.

Minsky was an ardent supporter of the Cyc project, the most notorious failure in the history of AI. The goal of Cyc was to solve AI by entering into a computer all the necessary knowledge. When the project began in the 1980s, its leader, Doug Lenat, confidently predicted success within a decade. Thirty years later, Cyc continues to grow without end in sight, and commonsense reasoning still eludes it. Ironically, Lenat has belatedly embraced populating Cyc by mining the web, not because Cyc can read, but because there’s no other way. Even if by some miracle we managed to finish coding up all the necessary pieces, our troubles would be just beginning. Over the years, a number of research groups have attempted to build complete intelligent agents by putting together algorithms for vision, speech recognition, language understanding, reasoning, planning, navigation, manipulation, and so on. Without a unifying framework, these attempts soon hit an insurmountable wall of complexity: too many moving parts, too many interactions, too many bugs for poor human software engineers to cope with. Knowledge engineers believe AI is just an engineering problem, but we have not yet reached the point where engineering can take us the rest of the way. In 1962, when Kennedy gave his famous moon-shot speech, going to the moon was an engineering problem. In 1662, it wasn’t, and that’s closer to where AI is today. In industry, there’s no sign that knowledge engineering will ever be able to compete with machine learning outside of a few niche areas. Why pay experts to slowly and painfully encode knowledge into a form computers can understand, when you can extract it from data at a fraction of the cost? What about all the things the experts don’t know but you can discover from data? And when data is not available, the cost of knowledge engineering seldom exceeds the benefit. Imagine if farmers had to engineer each cornstalk in turn, instead of sowing the seeds and letting them grow: we would all starve.

But American capitalism was not ideologically rigid. It was never the laissez-faire laboratory of purist, principled imaginations. The strength of the system came through its pragmatism and flexibility, juggling competing and contradictory ideas, just as Carnegie did personally, and eventually finding political solutions to seemingly intractable issues, especially after the scars of the Civil War. Just as successful species adapted to changes in their environment, democracy would shape capitalism to adapt to social conditions, with compromise emerging as the best form of insurance against any risk of revolution. This middle ground, forged by the clashing interactions of capitalism and democracy, a free people acting to check free markets, would give rise to the regulatory framework that would govern its economic system.

Presently, foundational resources essential to cutting-edge AI research and development like compute power, datasets, development frameworks and pre-trained models, remain overwhelmingly centralized under the control of Amazon, Microsoft, Google and several other giants who operate the dominant cloud computing platforms. Open source efforts cannot truly flourish or compete if trapped within the confines of the Big Tech clouds and proprietary ecosystems.

Developing leaders who can navigate complexity is now a strategic priority—and, if done well, a competitive advantage. Beyond developing competency and capability, we need to develop leaders with courage and compassion, consciousness and character.

is clear that neither countries nor regions can flourish if their cities (innovation ecosystems) are not being continually nourished. Cities have been the engines of economic growth, prosperity and social progress throughout history, and will be essential to the future competitiveness of nations and regions. Today, more than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas, ranging from mid-size cities to megacities, and the number of city dwellers worldwide keeps rising. Many factors that affect the competitiveness of countries and regions – from innovation and education to infrastructure and public administration – are under the purview of cities. The speed and breadth by which cities absorb and deploy technology, supported by agile policy frameworks, will determine their ability to compete in attracting talent. Possessing a superfast broadband, putting into place digital technologies in transportation, energy consumption, waste recycling and so on help make a city more efficient and liveable, and therefore more attractive than others. It is therefore critical that cities and countries around the world focus on ensuring access to and use of the information and communication technologies on which much of the fourth industrial revolution depends. Unfortunately, as the World Economic Forum’s Global Information Technology Report 2015 points out, ICT infrastructures are neither as prevalent nor diffusing as fast as many people believe. “Half of the world’s population does not have mobile phones and 450 million people still live out of reach of a mobile signal. Some 90% of the population of low-income countries and over 60% globally are not online yet. Finally, most mobile phones are of an older generation.”45

The post-bourgeois capitalist class does not feel responsible for the community and the territory because financial capitalism is totally deterritorialized and has no interest in the future well-being of the community. On the other hand, the post-Fordist worker no longer shares the same interest as his/her colleagues, but, on the contrary, is forced to compete every day against other workers for a job and a salary in the deregulated labour arena. Within the framework of this new precarious organization of labour, building solidarity becomes a difficult task.

Buytendijk, F. (2010) Dealing with Dilemmas: Where Business Analytics Fall Short, New York, John Wiley. Hampden-Turner, C. (1990) Charting the Corporate Mind: Graphic Solutions to Business Conflicts, New York, The Free Press. Trompenaars, F., Woolliams, P. (2009) ‘Towards a Generic Framework of Competence for Today’s Global Village’, in: The SAGE Handbook of Intercultural Competence, ed. D.K. Deardorff, Thousand Oaks, Sage.

Double-click degrees are a competency-based system within the current degree framework. As such, they are a way station on the road to unbundling. While many employers today request college transcripts, particularly for entry-level positions, transcripts are used for degree verification, not to specify competencies or skills that match the employer’s needs. This is because transcripts are opaque to employers. No human resources or hiring manager is equipped to decipher a particular transcript from a particular institution. No employer is able to forecast job performance from student transcripts.

A researcher said, “A diverse nation is a more divided nation.” Who knew? Duh! Multicultural nations are always divided, and, as Abraham Lincoln told us, a House divided against itself cannot stand. Multiculturalism must be smashed to smithereens. What we need is a diverse monoculture, as prevailed in ancient Greece, with its countless city-states, all following a common religion, language and general culture. We need competitive diversity, but an overall level of cooperation and common identity. Football teams compete with each other in a league. They all obey the rules and framework of the league, and don’t go off and do their own thing. The league is a diverse monoculture. In a multicultural system, different cultures would reject the league, and create their own leagues, or even reject football entirely, and play alien sports imported from their originating cultures. It’s time people got real. Multicultural division is a disaster. Monocultural division is competitive and enjoyable.

A key component of this system is kaizen, a Japanese word meaning “change for better,” which has been applied to many areas, including business, to facilitate continual improvement. By applying the kaizen approach, Toyota realizes greater resource efficiency, and in the case of Toyota Saudi Arabia, Toyota saved $3.33 million by not having to invest in new facilities nor to increase the number of installers needed to meet the increase in demand. Kaizen is modeled after the scientific method, a proven process consisting of systematic observation, measurement, and experimentation, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses. Kaizen and the foundations of the scientific method can also be specifically applied to marketing to encourage continuous improvement in the organization to reach our business marketing goals. Similarly, the Data-First Marketing Campaign Framework involves not only the execution of marketing tactics but also the continuous improvement of those tactics as measured against our business marketing strategy and business goals.

David versus Goliath Asymmetry lies at the heart of network-based competition. The larger or smaller network will be at different stages of the Cold Start framework and, as such, will gravitate toward a different set of levers. The giant is often fighting gravitational pull as its network grows and saturates the market. To combat these negative forces, it must add new use cases, introduce the product to new audiences, all while making sure it’s generating a profit. The upstart, on the other hand, is trying to solve the Cold Start Problem, and often starts with a niche. A new startup has the luxury of placing less emphasis on profitability and might instead focus on top-line growth, subsidizing the market to grow its network. When they encounter each other in the market, it becomes natural that their competitive moves reflect their different goals and resources. Startups have fewer resources—capital, employees, distribution—but have important advantages in the context of building new networks: speed and a lack of sacred cows. A new startup looking to compete against Zoom might try a more specific use case, like events, and if that doesn’t work, they can quickly pivot and try something else, like corporate education classes. Startups like YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, and many other products have similar stories, and went through an incubation phase as the product was refined and an initial network was built. Trying and failing many times is part of the startup journey—it only takes the discovery of one atomic network to get into the market. With that, a startup is often able to start the next leg of the journey, often with more investment and resources to support them. Contrast that to a larger company, which has obvious advantages in resources, manpower, and existing product lines. But there are real disadvantages, too: it’s much harder to solve the Cold Start Problem with a slower pace of execution, risk aversion, and a “strategy tax” that requires new products to align to the existing business. Something seems to happen when companies grow to tens of thousands of employees—they inevitably create rigorous processes for everything, including planning cycles, performance reviews, and so on. This helps teams focus, but it also creates a harder environment for entrepreneurial risk-taking. I saw this firsthand at Uber, whose entrepreneurial culture shifted in its later years toward profitability and coordinating the efforts of tens of thousands. This made it much harder to start new initiatives—for better and worse. When David and Goliath meet in the market—and often it’s one Goliath and many investor-funded Davids at once—the resulting moves and countermoves are fascinating. Now that I have laid down some of the theoretical foundation for how competition fits into Cold Start Theory, let me describe and unpack some of the most powerful moves in the network-versus-network playbook.

The Emotion Revolution Before the current burst of research into emotion, most scientists understood our feelings within a framework that goes all the way back to the ideas of Charles Darwin. That traditional theory of emotion embraced a number of principles that seem intuitively plausible: that there is a small set of basic emotions—fear, anger, sadness, disgust, happiness, and surprise—that are universal among all cultures and have no functional overlap; that each emotion is triggered by specific stimuli in the external world; that each emotion causes fixed and specific behaviors; and that each emotion occurs in specific dedicated structures in the brain. This theory also encompassed a dichotomous view of the mind that goes back at least to the ancient Greeks: that the mind consists of two competing forces, one “cold,” logical, and rational and the other “hot,” passionate, and impulsive. For millennia these ideas informed thinking in fields from theology to philosophy to the science of the mind. Freud incorporated the traditional theory into his work. John Mayer and Peter Salovey’s theory of “emotional intelligence,” popularized by the 1995 book of that name by Daniel Goleman, is in part based on it. And it is the framework for most of what we think about our feelings. But it is wrong.

Define the Profitable Core In our experience, business definition is one of the most frustrating activities for senior executives. Although business leaders know that they should have a clear answer to the question, “What is our core business?” it is difficult to arrive at a fully satisfying statement. Part of the problem arises from blurring several distinct but related topics that need to be considered one at a time and then integrated in a consistent manner or within a single framework. In working toward a useful business definition, executives need to ask themselves the following questions: What are the boundaries of the business in which I participate, and are those boundaries “natural” economic boundaries defined by customer needs and basic economics? What products, customers, channels, and competitors do these boundaries encompass? What are the core skills and assets needed to compete effectively within that competitive arena? What is my own core business as defined by those customers, products, technologies, and channels through which I can earn a return today and can compete effectively with my current resources? What is the key differentiating factor that makes me unique to my core customers? What are the adjacent areas around my core, and are the definitions of my business and my industry likely to shift, changing the competitive and customer landscape?

Many of us see emotions as naturally occurring. But emotions are political in two key ways. First, our emotions are shaped by our biases and beliefs, our cultural frameworks. For example, if I believe—consciously or unconsciously—that it is normal and appropriate for men to express anger but not women, I will have very different emotional responses to men’s and women’s expressions of anger. I might see a man who expresses anger as competent and in charge and may feel respect for him, while I see a woman who expresses anger as childish and out of control and may feel contempt for her. If I believe that only bad people are racist, I will feel hurt, offended, and shamed when an unaware racist assumption of mine is pointed out. If I instead believe that having racist assumptions is inevitable (but possible to change), I will feel gratitude when an unaware racist assumption is pointed out; now I am aware of and can change that assumption. In this way, emotions are not natural; they are the result of the frameworks we are using to make sense of social relations. And of course, social relations are political. Our emotions are also political because they are often externalized; our emotions drive behaviors that impact other people.

In the last dark age, one can search the inquiries of this era's preserved of thinkers from Augustine to Ockham, and fail to discover a single page of criticism of the established social framework, however rationally insupportable feudal bondage, absolute paternalism, divine right of kings and the rest may be. In the current final order, is it so different? Can we see in any media or even university press a paragraph of clear unmasking of a global regime that condemns a third of all children to malnutrition with more food than enough available? In such a social order, thought becomes indistinguishable from propaganda. Only one doctrine is speakable, and a priest caste of its experts prescribes the necessities and obligations to all. Social consciousness is incarcerated within the role of a kind of ceremonial logic, operating entirely within the received framework of an exhaustively prescribed regulatory apparatus protecting the privileges of the privileged. Methodical censorship triumphs in the guise of scholarly rigor, and the only room left for searching thought becomes the game of competing rationalizations.

Professor Michael Porter of Harvard Business School asserts: “Once a company achieves competitive advantage through an innovation, it can sustain it only through relentless improvement. Almost any advantage can be imitated.” He adds, “Ultimately, the only way to sustain competitive advantage is to upgrade it—to move to more sophisticated types. This is precisely what Japanese auto-makers have done. They initially penetrated foreign markets with small, inexpensive compact cars of adequate quality and competed on the basis of lower labor costs. Even while their labor-cost advantage persisted, however, the Japanese companies were upgrading. . . .

In a 2009 paper, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) described skills and competencies that young people require in order to benefit from and contribute to a rapidly changing world. The OECD distinguishes these by defining skills as the ability to perform tasks and solve problems. Skills include critical thinking, responsibility, decision making, and flexibility. They define competencies as the ability to apply skills and knowledge in a specific context such as school or work. The OECD framework for 21st century skills and competencies has three dimensions: Figure 1.2 Center for Public Education Source: Jerald (2009). Used with permission. Information: This dimension includes accessing, selecting, evaluating, organizing, and using information in digital environments. Use of the information involves understanding the relationships between the elements and generation of new ideas. The competencies necessary to effectively use information include research and problem-solving skills. Communication: This dimension includes the ability to exchange, critique, and present information, and also the ability to use tools and technologies in a reflective and interactive way. The requisite skills are based on sharing and transmitting information to others. Ethics and Social Impact: This dimension involves a consideration of the social, economic, and cultural implications of technologies, and an awareness of the impact of one’s actions on others and the larger society. Skills and competencies required for this are global understanding and personal responsibility.

In my experience, value-based strategy, the approach I describe in this book, is well suited to cutting through complexities and evaluating strategic initiatives. The framework provides a powerful tool that will allow you to see how your digital strategy is (or is not) related to your global ambitions, and how your marketing strategy is (or is not) consistent with the way you compete in the market for talent.

For example, if I believe—consciously or unconsciously—that it is normal and appropriate for men to express anger but not women, I will have very different emotional responses to men’s and women’s expressions of anger. I might see a man who expresses anger as competent and in charge and may feel respect for him, while I see a woman who expresses anger as childish and out of control and may feel contempt for her. If I believe that only bad people are racist, I will feel hurt, offended, and shamed when an unaware racist assumption of mine is pointed out. If I instead believe that having racist assumptions is inevitable (but possible to change), I will feel gratitude when an unaware racist assumption is pointed out; now I am aware of and can change that assumption. In this way, emotions are not natural; they are the result of the frameworks we are using to make sense of social relations. And of course, social relations are political. Our emotions are also political because they are often externalized; our emotions drive behaviors that impact other people.

Cultural stories are also cliches. Without the frameworks they provide, people find it hard to know how to live life. We are barraged with competing messages, and in constant danger of mistaking slogans for personal experience. As the psychology Dan McAdams observes "People pick and choose and plagiarize selectively from the many stories and images they find in culture to formulate a narrative identity.

What they discovered is that the reason it's so hard to make a change you genuinely want to make is that beneath that desire for change there's a competing commitment. There is something else that we're more committed to than the change we want to make.79