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.
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.
“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.
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.