The Limits of Competence

Why Deltas should never be in charge

I’ve been reading the biography of Steve Jobs written by Walter Isaacson. It’s an absolute gold mine for anyone who wants to learn some very important lessons about how to fail and how to succeed in business, but it’s also got some revelatory passages that underline the importance of incorporating the Socio-Sexual Hierarchy into one’s business organization.

It’s not generally known that Jobs neither conceived nor named the Apple Macintosh. That being said, he absolutely deserves full credit for producing the computer that revolutionized the personal computer industry as well as provided the graphic user interface that we still use today, and why his replacement of the smart and highly competent Delta who was its original creator was not only fully justified, but absolutely key to its success.

Steve Jobs with the original Macintosh computer.

Raskin envisioned a machine that would sell for $1,000 and be a simple appliance, with screen and keyboard and computer allin one unit. To keep the cost down, he proposed a tiny five-inch screen and a very cheap (and underpowered) microprocessor, the Motorola 6809.

However, like most Delta engineers, Raskin lacked empathy, and despite his revolutionary vision of a computer for the masses, was therefore unable to grasp the difference between his personal preferences and the preferences of the masses who would actually be using the computer of his vision.

Raskin had convinced everyone to go to Xeroc PARC, and he liked the idea of a bitmapped display and windows, but he was not as charmed by all the cute graphics and icons, and he absolutely detested the idea of using a point-and-click mouse rather than the keyboard. “Some of the people on the project became enamoured of the quest to do everything with the mouse,” he later groused. “Another example is the absurd application of icons. An icon is a symbol equally incomprehensible in all human languages. There’s a reason why humans invented phonetic languages.”

The fascinating thing is that the development of the Apple Macintosh actually allows us to see the difference when a Sigma is heading a project versus when an equally visionary and even more skilled Delta is heading it.

Raskin’s ouster may not have seemed fair, but it ended up being good for the Macintosh. Raskin wanted an appliance with little memory, an anemic processor, a casette tape, no mouse, and minimal graphics. Unlike Jobs, he might have been able to keep the price down to close to $1,000, and that may have helped Apple win market share. But he could not have pulled off what Jobs did, which was to create and market a machine that would transform personal computing. In fact we can see where the road not taken led. Raskin was hired by Canon to build the machine he wanted.

It was the Canon Cat, and it was a total flop. Nobody wanted it.

Delta narcissism is why Deltas, particularly Deltas of the engineering variety, cannot be permitted to make executive decisions. And this is true no matter how smart, how skilled, or how competent they are.

The Canon Cat looks like a weird mutation of an Apple //e computer.

The Canon Cat is a task-dedicated microcomputer released by Canon Inc. in 1987 for $1,495. Its appearance resembles dedicated word processors of the late 1970s to early 1980s, but it is far more powerful, and has many unique ideas for data manipulation.

I find it interesting to observe that not only was Jobs proven spectacularly correct due to his focus on what he believed the customers would want rather than what he personally preferred, but that Raskin wasn’t even able to keep the price below $1,000 in the end.