If you’re still wondering what inflated the dotcom bubble, inflamed the financial crisis and ignited a series of recent corporate disasters, the answer is staring you in the face: it’s the stupidity, stupid.
你仍在纳闷是什么导致了互联网泡沫、金融危机以及近期一系列的企业灾难？答案就在你的面前：笨啊，是愚蠢造成的。
Failure to step back and question flawed assumptions and established working practices condemned internet start-ups, international banks and parts of the world economy to oblivion at worst, or at best, years of painful rehabilitation.
未能后退一步，质疑有缺陷的假设和现有的工作实践，在最坏情况下导致互联网初创企业、跨国银行以及全球经济的某些部门消失，在最好情况下也得让它们经受多年痛苦的改造。
“Functional stupidity” is the latest theory, conceived by Mats Alvesson and André Spicer, to describe the perilously bovine state into which many large organisations can easily sink. It is not the first contradiction in terms applied to such problems.
“功能性愚蠢”是马茨•阿尔维森(Mats Alvesson)和安德烈•斯派塞(André Spicer)提出的最新理论，用来描述许多大型组织很容易陷入的危险的迟钝状态。这并非首个描述此类问题的矛盾说法。
During the cold war, western apologists for the Soviet Union, unknowingly doing the bidding of their cynical Moscow masters, were described as “useful idiots”. In 1986, Chris Argyris wrote how otherwise proficient managers could unintentionally contribute to a regime of “skilled incompetence”, by adeptly avoiding pressing questions. Latterly, Margaret Heffernan has blamed “wilful blindness” for the catastrophes that befell Lehman Brothers, Bernard Madoff’s investors and Rupert Murdoch’s UK newspapers.
冷战期间，为苏联说好话的西方人不知不觉地听命于怀疑一切的莫斯科主子，被称为“有用的白痴”。1986年，克里斯•阿吉里斯(Chris Argyris)描写了在其它方面能干的经理人如何巧妙地避免紧迫问题，从而无意识地促成一种“熟练的无能”状态。最近，玛格丽特•赫弗南(Margaret Heffernan)将雷曼兄弟(Lehman Brothers)、伯纳德•马多夫(Bernard Madoff)的投资者和鲁珀特•默多克 (Rupert Murdoch)旗下英国报纸遭受的灾难归咎于“有意的无视”。