Almost 25 years ago in the pages of HBR, C.K. Prahalad and I urged managers to think in a different way about the building blocks of competitive success.  We argued that a business should be seen as a portfolio of “core competencies” as well as a portfolio of products.  By building and nurturing deep, hard-to-replicate skills, an organization could fatten margins and fuel growth.  While I still believe that distinctive capabilities are essential to distinctive performance, I have increasingly come to believe (as I argued in an earlier post) that even the most competent organizations also suffer from a clutch of core incompetencies. Businesses are, on average, far less adaptable, innovative, and inspiring than they could be and, increasingly, must be.