I don’t often express disagreement with my favorite marketing philosopher, Seth Godin.  Mostly because I think he’s an awfully wise man, and secondarily because I think he’s smarter than I am, which makes me think that if I don’t agree with him, it’s because I haven’t yet figured out what he already knows.

But Godin’s post about Multiple Dumbness, well, struck me as problematic.  I sat on it for a day, pondering why I was wrong and he was right, but failed to come up with the reason.  Thus, I take a chance and challenge his thoughts, assuming that someone will help me by pointing out the error of my ways.

The gist of Godin’s position is that, much as there are multiple intelligences, the opposite is equally true.

The flip side of this occurred to me the other day, as I was busy judging someone for being really dumb. Of course, no one is really dumb. And certainly no one deserves to be judged as such. If we’re good at different things, we’re also bad at different things, right?

No disagreement that we are bad at different things, though it’s unclear that it follows that no one is really dumb.  Life is patently unfair, and there are people who have no strengths, meaning that they are a bundle of weaknesses.  I know. I’ve met them.  I’ve represented some of them.  Not everybody has a redeeming feature.  The best you can say about them is that one weakness isn’t as bad as another, though none rises to the point of not being a weakness at all.

From this, Godin concludes:

The story people tell about you (and the one you tell about yourself in the way you act) may be broadcasting one of your weaknesses louder than you deserve. We often fail to hire or trust or work with someone merely because one of their attributes stands out as below par. That’s our loss.

I suspect this isn’t the case at all.  We choose not to hire or trust or work with someone because the dumbness at hand is the one that applies to our reason for considering this person in the first place.  If one is hiring, trusting, working with a lawyer, does it matter that he plays a mean jazz piano if he can’t present a persuasive argument?  You might want to go to a club and hear him tickle the ivories, but you don’t want him standing next to you when your life is on the line.

The “I’m OK, You’re OK” culture leads us to be kinder and more understanding to others.  This is a good thing when it comes to our behavior in general, learning to appreciate the positives and strengths of others.  This is a wonderful perspective to have when attending cocktail parties or meeting people on the street.  But Seth employs it as a business tool, something to recognize before separating the wheat from the chaff.

Does this constitute a loss?  Probably not.  Sure, you might hurt someone’s feelings by not loving them as much as they want to be loved, or denying them a job, your business, your trust.  But we are constrained to discriminate upon the basis of competency, and the fact that an “attribute stands out as below par” seems an awfully good reason to do so.

Often, people bemoan the fact that they believe they can do the job, deserve the trust, if only the other person would give them the chance.  It’s because of this cultural expectation that they are entitled to the benefit of the doubt, the shifting of risk from the person who comes off poorly to the person who is seeking a new hire, a trusted advisor, a reliable colleague, that people fail to address their shortcomings. 

Far too many people today celebrate their shortcomings, as if it’s their right to be wrong and they should be proud of their flaws.  While they may well feel that their flaws don’t render them worthless, they similarly aren’t the sort of thing that commands others to trust us.  Suggestions like Godin’s, that it’s wrong to decide that someone who doesn’t play piano particularly well isn’t the right person to book for Carnegie Hall, because he may have some alternative talent that doesn’t immediately appear, encourage this sense of entitlement.  Some people are dumb.  Some people can’t play piano.  It may not be shameful, but it’s no good reason to hire them either.

Perhaps dumbness, in its various forms, is a Darwinian form of protection, steering people away from the things they do poorly and toward the things they do well.  This doesn’t help those people who do nothing well, or are dumb in all things, but I suspect society even has a place for them.  If so, then Seth is fighting nature, and that’s a battle that even Seth Godin will lose.