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The Value of Merit
Does merit apply to a person or an action?
NOTE: Within this text, wherever gender is not key to the explanation, I am using the Elverson ey/em construction of the Spivak Pronouns.
My dear old dad, an Oklahoma entrepreneur, used to be emotionally attached to a story. He would tell me this story whenever he sought to differentiate “us” from “them”. It went like this:
A certain factory used a very complex and specialized machine to perform a certain crucial operation in the manufacturing process. One day, the machine failed and the production line was frozen. Technicians swarmed over the machine trying to locate the cause of the failure but after several hours reported that they had made no progress. The president of the company remembered that “Old Bob”, recently retired, had built the machine and so called him in to consult.
Old Bob showed up and looked over the machine. He checked voltages and tapped and turned screws and finally pulled…
