Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Doing

The story of Jet Li demonstrates a common mistake in judgement, which - in the generic language of logic - runs as follows:

"A can do this task better than B, therefore A should do it."

This is wrong. The consideration should go like this:

"If A and B can both achieve a minimal standard of accomplishing the task, and if A could use that amount of time to make a yet bigger contribution (to the organization or society as a whole), then B should do the task - even though A could do it much better."

Unfortunately, many well-intentioned A would rush to take up the task from B's hand.

And most extra-terrestrials have difficulty to follow any logical statement with more than one verb - that's how many of the hospital or department or division policies come along.

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