Quotes About Competence

For some reason all the middle-aged women he knew were very efficient.

Talent is like a container. You can work as hard as you want, but the size will never change. It'll only hold so much water and no more.

The world would be a real mess if everybody was a genius. Somebody's got to keep watch, take care of business.

Executives also owe it to the organization and to their fellow workers not to tolerate nonperforming individuals in important jobs. It may not be the employees' fault that they are underperforming, but even so, they have to be removed.

THEY ARE CHILDREN!' Mr Wallaker roared. 'They are not corporate products! What they need to acquire is not a constant massaging of the ego, but confidence, fun, affection, love, a sense of self-worth. They need to understand, now, that there will always – always – be someone greater and lesser than themselves, and that their self-worth lies in their contentment with who they are, what they are doing and their increasing competence in doing it.

No one looks at your hands to see how much they shake when you are interviewed to be a surgeon. The physical skills required are no greater than for writing cursive script. If an operation requires so much skill only a few surgeons can do it, you modify the operation to make it simpler.

The improvisational nature of jazz musicianship is such that a truly competent performer must be prepared to function as an on-the-spot composer who is expected to contribute to the orchestration in progress, not simply to execute the score as it is written and rehearsed.

Your performance depends on your people. Select the best, train them and back them. When errors occur, give sharper guidance. If errors persist or if the fit feels wrong, help them move on. The country cannot afford amateur hour in the White House.

When I wrote 'The West Wing,' the juice behind it was that in popular culture, our leaders in government are generally portrayed as Machiavellian, or as idiots. I thought, well, how about writing about a group of hyper-competent people?

I know my way around the WWE. I know at least a little bit about everything and our business model, and I feel comfortable there, although I still learn every day.

Fortunately, in the WWE, the security staff is very dedicated and very professional. They know what they're doing.

Since I'm not in WWE, some people think I'm not even in their league. It's easy for me to tune those people out because they have no idea what they're talking about.

I think that people don't know how to do anything anymore. My father was a janitor. He could take a car apart and put it back together. He could build a house in the back yard. Today, if you ask people what they know, they say, 'I know how to hire someone.'

As far as my personal confidence, do I believe I'm one of the best in the league? Yeah, of course.

Stardom is just an uneasy seat on top of a tricky toboggan. Being a star is merely perching at the head of the downgrade. A competent featured player can last a lifetime. A star, a year or two. There's all that agony of finding suitable stories, keeping in character, maintaining illusion.

When you're a rookie, the game moves a 1000 miles per hour. But each year, you get more mature, the game slows down for you, and that's when you realize you're getting better at belonging. When you know where to go and where to be, that's when the game is coming a little easier to you.

I have had the pleasure of knowing Mitt Romney for several years now. There's so much to appreciate about him. He fixes things. He's results-driven. He's taken broken companies and made them successful.

Because of the nature of Moore's law, anything that an extremely clever graphics programmer can do at one point can be replicated by a merely competent programmer some number of years later.

The tragedy is that so many have ambition and so few have ability.

It's possible to train great people, but a person with great training who doesn't have certain characteristics is only going to go so far.

I think anybody can do any of these if they train. I don't recommend it, but anybody could do it if there was a need.

Before they deploy, they train for the specific operations, but there is a danger that the Army is not retaining the core of its full capabilities.

I was never trained for anything.

Being in construction my whole life - I was trained as an architect - I always had to work with guys. And I always did my homework and then challenged them to figure it out faster than me. They don't want to be shown up by a woman.