Background and Context
This maxim was collected May 21, 2016, the same day as "Mike on Being an Expert Generalist" — the two appear to be part of a single sitting in which Mike set down working statements of professional standard rather than a running journal entry tied to one incident. No project, team, or specific failure is named or implied anywhere in the file; unlike "Mike on Courseware Design," which carries its own explanatory note, this one offers no gloss at all. It is the shortest and starkest entry in the "Mike's Maxims" folder — seven words, no qualifier, no example — filed alongside maxims on expert generalism, decisive execution, and courseware discipline that together read as a working code of professional conduct assembled across a career in instructional design and leadership.
Interpretation
The maxim's entire argument lives in one verb choice: tolerate, not accept, forgive, or understand. To tolerate something is to permit its continued presence within a domain one controls — a parent tolerates a child's mess, a landlord tolerates noise, a manager tolerates a habit. Tolerance is inherently relational and asymmetric: it presumes a position of standing or authority over the thing being tolerated or not. Mike isn't describing a personal reaction to incompetence he happens to witness in the world at large — he has no standing to "tolerate" or refuse to tolerate a stranger's failure with no bearing on him. The maxim is scoped, even though it never says so explicitly, to whatever falls within his own sphere: a team he leads, a course he's accountable for, work he has agreed to put his name behind. Read this way, "I don't tolerate incompetence" is less a judgment about other people than a boundary statement about what he will permit to continue inside his own domain of responsibility.
The present tense matters as much as the verb. "I don't tolerate" is a standing policy, not a one-time reaction to a specific event — the grammar of a rule someone has decided to live by, not a complaint about something that just happened. That distinguishes it from venting. A maxim phrased as an ongoing disposition functions as a public commitment device: having said it, and presumably said it to people who report to him or work alongside him, Mike has made the standard visible and difficult to quietly abandon the next time enforcing it is inconvenient. This is the same logic behind any leader announcing a red line in advance rather than deciding case by case — the advance statement is what gives the standard teeth, because it removes the option of pretending, after the fact, that the bar was never really there.
What the maxim conspicuously does not do is define its terms, and that omission is worth sitting with rather than explaining away. "Incompetence" in its strict sense — from the Latin competere, to be fit or suitable — names an inability, a lack of the skill or knowledge a role requires. It is a different failure than negligence (the skill exists but wasn't applied), laziness (effort was withheld), or bad luck (no failure of skill or effort occurred at all). A more careful policy statement might distinguish these; this one doesn't, and the flatness is arguably the point. Maxims are compression devices, built to be remembered and repeated rather than to survive cross-examination, and this one trades precision for force. It functions less like a human-resources clause and more like commander's intent — a short, blunt line meant to travel intact through a room and be recalled under pressure, with the finer distinctions left to be worked out in the moment they're actually needed.
Current Relevance
The maxim sits inside a live and unresolved argument about how directness and psychological safety coexist in modern management. Kim Scott's Radical Candor (2017) — built around the axis of "care personally" and "challenge directly" — argues explicitly for exactly the kind of blunt standard-setting this maxim performs, while warning that the same bluntness, delivered without the "care personally" half, curdles into what Scott calls obnoxious aggression: honesty as a weapon rather than a gift. Read alone, stripped of context about how Mike actually delivers the standard day to day, the maxim is compatible with either reading — it could be the confident half of a Radical Candor stance, or it could be the whole of a much colder one. The file itself doesn't resolve which, which is itself informative: it was written as a private note-to-self, not as public messaging calibrated for how it would land on someone else.
A second, sharper-edged echo shows up in Reed Hastings's "keeper test" culture at Netflix, documented in No Rules Rules (2020): the explicit policy that managers should ask, of every employee, whether they'd fight to keep that person if the person were considering leaving — and if not, sever the relationship rather than "tolerate" adequate-but-not-excellent performance. That culture has been praised for producing extraordinary results and criticized, by former employees and researchers of workplace culture alike, for corroding the trust and psychological safety that Amy Edmondson's research identifies as the actual precondition for teams to admit and fix errors rather than hide them. The maxim's current relevance is exactly this tension: zero-tolerance standards raise the visible bar, but the research on error-reporting suggests that fear of harsh judgment for incompetence can paradoxically produce more of it, driven underground rather than corrected.
Impact and Legacy
As a private, seven-word note rather than a published statement, this maxim's legacy is inseparable from the folder that holds it. Read next to "Mike on Getting Things Done" ("Fine, now get the hell out of my way") and "Mike on Courseware Design" ("building is everything"), it supplies the enforcement mechanism the other two assume but never state outright — those maxims describe what good execution looks like; this one names what happens to work that fails to meet the bar. Together the three sketch a single coherent professional stance: decide, build, and hold the line on quality, in that order. Its influence, like every other entry in this folder, is scoped entirely to the people who have worked directly under Mike's standard rather than to any wider public discourse — but within that scope, a maxim this short and this often-repeatable is exactly the kind of line that outlives the meeting or project that provoked it.
Contrasting Views or Controversies
The maxim's clearest vulnerability is the one its own brevity creates: it doesn't distinguish incompetence (a genuine skill gap) from negligence, poor training, unclear expectations, or plain bad luck, and a standard that punishes all four identically risks being unjust to the people whose failure was the organization's, not their own. Amy Edmondson's psychological-safety research is the sharpest version of this objection — teams that fear harsh, undifferentiated judgment for mistakes report fewer errors, not because fewer errors occur, but because people learn to hide them, which produces worse outcomes than a culture that treats an honest mistake as a learning opportunity rather than a verdict on someone's fitness for the role.
A second objection is that "incompetence" is a term with no fixed, observable definition, which makes any zero-tolerance policy toward it vulnerable to bias — what one manager calls incompetence, another calls an unfamiliar working style, a communication mismatch, or simply someone who reminds them of a past disappointment. Absent a clear, applied standard for what competence actually requires in a given role, "I don't tolerate incompetence" can function as cover for far less defensible judgments, weaponized selectively rather than applied consistently — the exact failure mode Radical Candor's "obnoxious aggression" category names.
A third, more structural objection challenges the premise that incompetence is always a matter of individual failing at all. Deming's management theory — foundational to modern quality-control thinking — holds that the large majority of workplace defects trace back to systems, not individuals: unclear processes, inadequate tools, insufficient training. A maxim that locates the fault entirely in the person risks punishing individuals for organizational failures the person had no power to prevent, mistaking a systems problem for a character problem.
Practical Application
- Individual (holding the standard): State the standard before it's tested, not after — a red line announced in advance is a commitment; the same line invoked only after someone has already failed reads as retroactive and arbitrary, and loses the disciplinary force the maxim depends on.
- Individual (on the receiving end): Distinguish, honestly, whether a given failure reflects a genuine skill gap worth addressing through training or practice, or a mismatch of expectations worth clarifying directly — the maxim's usefulness to you depends on knowing which one you're actually looking at.
- Organizational (leadership): Pair the standard with the investment that makes it fair — clear onboarding, explicit performance criteria, real training resources — so that "incompetence" measured against the standard reflects an actual, addressable gap rather than an organization's own failure to prepare someone adequately.
- Organizational (culture design): Separate, deliberately, the treatment of honest mistakes (which should be surfaced and examined without fear, per Edmondson's research) from the treatment of a demonstrated, sustained inability to meet a clearly stated bar — conflating the two either punishes honesty or excuses genuine unfitness.
- Civic (any accountability structure): Where a "no tolerance" standard is invoked publicly — in policy, in governance, in institutional oversight — require the standard itself to be defined and applied consistently before treating any single case as a violation of it; an undefined standard, applied selectively, is not a standard at all.
Background on the Author
Mike Hower's collected maxims read as accumulated field notes from a career spent inside instructional design and organizational leadership — a discipline where incompetence has direct, measurable consequences: a course built by someone unequipped to build it fails the learners who depend on it, not just the organization that paid for it. That professional vantage is what gives this particular maxim its edge; it isn't a general complaint about other people's shortcomings, but the standard of someone whose own work has repeatedly been judged by whether it actually produced competent outcomes for the people downstream of it. Filed the same day as "Mike on Being an Expert Generalist" — itself an argument that real competence can be broad rather than narrowly specialized — the two maxims together suggest a consistent throughline: competence, however it's built, is the non-negotiable floor beneath everything else in his collected professional philosophy.