We all love Mediocrity!

In the world that demands serious innovation, competitive advantage, leading edge, market leadership, brand image and brand value, mediocrity is a killer. I find many corporate people have lost sense of reasoning, analytic thinking  and sense of purpose. It takes them lot of time to define any situation, understand complexity, relate factors that affect the situation, check for possible solutions, etc. They are too slow and incapable to think through unstructured and unfamiliar tracks. Organisations are full of incompetent people, built over years who have settled like silt and moss into the system. They create a termite effect. They promote sycophancy, boot licking, compromise with conscience and kill spirits of free thinking, rationale and radical thought process, plans and actions. Status Quo is the orgasmic state of being inefficient and incompetent. Ask for leaders and managers to publish their KRAs and KPIs and present scorecard periodically. You will find 80% of them have either not been able to define KRAs and KPIs well and 90% of them would have KRAs and KPIs as talk lists, the everyday chore of admin stuff they do.In this situation, how can one expect serious innovation, competitive advantage, leading edge, market leadership, brand image and brand value. This is the killer app, called Mediocrity. If you have a better term than this this shall be Son-in-Law syndrome. Liability and no accountability. How much of mediocrity has this phenomena created over years. This is a syndicate of the mediocre  who keep the talent away. They conspire to keep only C players and a few B players. This gives them ease of life and importance of their position. I am surprised when a large Indian Pharma company that has close to 300 people in Human Resources function is looking for an OD professional to hire. I am shocked that in 30 years of their existence and 300 odd HR folks at all levels of compensation, have not been able to produce 10 good OD professionals. This is shocking and revealing truth that mediocrity loves  Status Quo.. Long live mediocrity.