Bumblers keep creating crises that didn’t need to happen.
George Anders, The Rare Find:  Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else

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Have you ever done anything stupid?  OK – maybe you haven’t.  But I have.  And, I suspect, if your answer is not “yes,” then you are either a liar, or you’ve got a pretty unrealistic view of your own life history.

I think that one way to describe the challenge of life is this:  quit being so stupid!

As I read The Rare Find, my mind drifted back to an idea I read from Neil Postman.  (Postman is probably best known for his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death).  In his essay The  Educationist as Painkiller, he ponders the purpose of education.  And his conclusion, simply, is that education can’t make a person smart — but it can keep a person from being so stupid.  (The essay is available in pdf format here).

Here are a few quotes from Postman’s essay:

This is the strategy I propose for educationists—that we abandon our vague, seemingly arrogant, and ultimately futile attempts to make children intelligent, and concentrate our attention on helping them avoid being stupid.
The educationist should become an expert in stupidity and be able to prescribe specific procedures for avoiding it…
…everyone practices stupidity, including those who write about it; none of us is ever free of it, and we are most seriously endangered when we think we are safe. That there is an almost infinite supply of stupidity, including our own, should provide educationists with a sense of humility and, incidentally, assurance that they will never become obsolete.
stupidity is reducible…
Stupidity is a form of behavior. It is not something we have; it is something we do.

So, why did I think of this essay as I read The Rare Find?  Partly because of this:  after massive amounts of money spent developing processes for finding and hiring the right people, every book and article I read seems to say that we have not gotten very good at it.  And that includes hiring all up and down the organizational ladder.  (As I write this, RIM {BlackBerry} just replaced its two CEOs with a new “savior.”)   And the statistics pretty much prove this.  Here’s a brief summary from Anders’ book:

In 2010:  only 18% of HR Managers say they are “winning the war for talent.”  All the rest stated they were either “losing ground” or “stuck” with a process that was not successful in identifying exceptional talent.

So, we make stupid hires; and then those people hired do stupid things.  Avoiding such stupidity would be a great, massive step forward, and save a boatload of money and a whole lot of anxiety and despair.  And as the quote at the top of this post affirms,

Bumblers keep creating crises that didn’t need to happen.

The Rare Find provides one remedy:  part of this stupidity is that we trust our “gut” way too often, when our minds, if we could simply focus them, would scream out some much needed warnings.  The Rare Find describes just how hard it is to actually listen to a job candidate, to actually look at work and life history, and then to avoid being “wowed” by the pizazz of a person’s personality.

In other words, if we could focus our minds, we might not make such stupid decisions – in hiring, and in our own life, at work, and everywhere else.

Maybe “don’t be stupid, stupid” should be our mantra…