Where's YOUR Dock?

Years ago, at a time when the Internet serviced fewer than a thousand websites, a couple of us at a Cambridge, Massachusetts, think tank were kicking around the implications of that number one day reaching a million or more.

"What if a tea farm in Cambodia could partner with a global distributor out of New Jersey at the click of a mouse?" I mused.

"With the right interfaces in place, the two could actually dock with one another just like the space shuttle," added my thinking partner Nicholas Vitalari. "They'd never even have to meet face to face."

From that conversation sprang the notion of The Capable Enterprise, a prescient if blandly titled white paper I penned on the power of complementary partnership. The model went something like the following.

Say my company followed the conventional wisdom of that era, C. K. Prahalad's and Gary Hamel 's seminal work on core competence, and invested heavily in what we did best while ignoring the weaker bits, the peripheral but necessary stuff that allowed our strengths to shine. But what if, instead of blissfully hoping they'll improve on their own, I could jettison those weaker bits that might be canceling out my company's strengths and graft instead in their place a set of world-class capabilities supplied by a would-be partner? The boundaries of the resulting 'capable enterprise' would be reconstituted as the complete set of optimized, if not wholly controlled, competencies.

Years later, having watched capable enterprises like the Amazon marketplace redefine how small businesses leveraged their core competencies alongside those of complementary but equal partners, I am tempted to coin another unassuming but, I believe, more powerful term of art: The Capable Individual.

I have previously written that the success of organizations crystal clear about their product lines, proprietary 'sauce,' and precise branding can suggest to individuals winning strategies for managing their personal lives. Like such companies, each of us is an amalgamation of core competencies and weaker peripheral attributes that, taken together, define the sum of our individual capabilities. As I have done within large organizations, I sometimes perform a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) on the enterprise I call my 'personstate,' i.e., Moi. Then, instead of accepting my weaknesses as necessary evils to be tolerated, glossed over, or written off against a forgetful future, I actually write down where I stand. How else will I know where and with whom I might later 'dock' to swap weakness for strength?

Uncommon ground is the most underrated attribute of genuine partnership. Stephen Covey used to say that he didn't care so much about what he already knew but was eternally fascinated by what others knew that he didn't. F. Scott Fitzgerald considered it the hallmark of a first-rate intelligence to hold simultaneously two opposed ideas. Fitzgerald borrowed this paradox from Keats whose principle of Negative Capability sought uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts because they invariably led him beyond himself to extrapersonal capabilities like empathy, integrity, and objectivity, whose perspectives he could not manufacture from within.

When Nick and I brainstormed how organizations might dock with one another to produce an enterprise greater than the sum of its parts, we did so within a Rubrik we learned from another member of our team. In describing the value of individual perspective, pioneering computer scientist Alan Kay would say that "Point of view is worth 80 IQ points." To extend Alan's metaphor, how many more points of IQ might I bring to a problem were I to draw from the uncommon ground I share with others? How quicker to break the genius barrier than to add the points of view—not to mention net new strengths—of an additional thinking partner or two? What a simple but exponentially rewarding act it might be to dock my many weaknesses alongside your many strengths in such a way that my weak will eventually give way to your strong.

Where's your dock?

Scott Knell is an American innovator, indirectionist, and author of the weekly LinkedIn column Say the Change. To read his personal and professional retrospective on Being and Becoming, visit his blog at?Indirections I Have Lived By.

? 2023 Scott Knell, all rights reserved.