TiE Delhi: Working with your Core Incompetence?

I was at a TiE workshop at India Corporate Center, Delhi on Saturday with Varun: "Being an Effective CEO: How to work with your Core Incompetence?" by Dr. Prasad Kaipa. Prasad did an excellent presentation and brought across with a very valid point that "Your most treasured strength is what becomes your biggest weakness and hinders you from getting to the next level." I was only partially at agreement with him when I had left the conference but as I continued thinking I started getting more and more inclined towards this point of view.

Some of the things that I had thought:

- Family system in India: We in India have strong family ties, something which most of us consider to be our biggest strength that supports and ensures success in our lives but after a point the same thing affects our ability to take risks. I personally have been really lucky on that front and I have always found motivation from my parents whether things have been good or bad at Wirkle. That though is not usually the case and most people even fear the risk of say joining a startup.

My colleague Sunil had written this a few months back in his post "Is joining startup really a Risk?"
Sunil wrote:

I remember once I was talking to this American lady in front of me, standing at the luggage check in queue at the IGI Airport. She was I guess a teacher and a painter by profession. She said you Indians are a lot lucky, you have such a strong family background especially financial stability provided by family networks. There in America, once you are 18 you are independent and you have to think all by yourself. She told me about an Indian guy in America whose mother had come to US and used to prepare all meals, bedding etc. for the guy, while the guy studied hard for his exams. Americans, she said are a lot insecure.

My response was, although Indians have strong family traditions but the same traditions make them less matured and mentally weaker. My personal belief is people in US or Europe are mentally more stronger than Indians and take more risks. On the contrary, the strong family background should have made Indians taking more risks! It might be I am just looking at a small spectrum of people, but that's what I got when talking to engineers in my last 1 year.

- Education: I think education provides us with a cushion and ensures that we will be able to earn well in our lives ahead but the very same thing may bring in a sense of undue security making you less susceptible to take any risks. Why is that most of the Harvard, MIT graduates are happy working for $200-$500K/year while some dropouts like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, etc. have been able to rise much higher?

- Flexibility: Lot of companies have a flexible vision and they take a path that allows them to adapt to the market. We at Wirkle do that, Yahoo does that, Microsoft does that..think of any company and most of them fall into this category. If a company is flexible then their vision/goal keeps on changing and you have to do a whole lot of new learning (bigger the learning curve bigger the time to actually perform) to succeed in the new marketplace. But again that doesn't mean you have to inflexible (Had Microsoft learnt that earlier there wouldn't have been a Google today)

In my opinion my core strength is to build strong relationships with people and continue those relationships. I have several people I know and always like to really spend time with them. Yet, this becomes my incompetence because when you know too many people you have only so much time to give to everyone (shrink it a whole lot if you work in a startup ,thus, leaving most of them complaining.

So what is your "Core Competence" and how does at times it becomes your "Core Incompetence?"