Scott Thompson, one assumes, is a clever man. And yet the new CEO of Yahoo has done something incredibly stupid. Claiming to have a degree in computer sciences and accountancy when you’ve only got a degree in accountancy is an idiotic thing to do.
Quite possibly the people at Diageo are also clever enough. But preventing a little brewer from winning a prize last week was a fabulously boneheaded piece of work.
Most definitely the bankers at JPMorgan are clever. Too clever by half, one might say. But that didn’t stop them losing $2bn through what its CEO Jamie Dimon called “error, sloppiness and poor judgment”.
Nearly always, it’s the bad little things we do that get us into the biggest trouble. It’s the things that we know are stupid even at the time we are doing them, but do anyway.
There is a new word for the idea of smart people making moronic errors: “disrationalia”. It has been coined by Keith Stanovich, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, who argues that we are preprogrammed to make daft mistakes. Partly it’s because we think we are better than we are. We also look for evidence that supports what we believe. And we get easily distracted.