Does the capability support the vision?

I have worked at a number of organisations, from the very obscure to the very well known, many of them market leaders in their field. And one thing I noticed is that each organisation has patchy skills. What I mean is, their staff range from brilliant to downright incompetent. At first, this discrepancy surprised me. “Why settle for crap when you know what excellent is? “ I used to wonder. Then I noticed the pattern: they hire excellent staff in their primary competency but have no ability to discern when they are dealing with the less familiar. So you get incompetent IT staff in publishing companies and poor design skills in software houses, for example.

Obvious but sad. Those companies can not produce well rounded solutions because they can not tell good from bad in disciplines that are critical to their future success, but secondary to their central expertise.