We’ve all heard of, read about or experienced situations in the professional realm that made us wonder, “What were they thinking?”
According to “The Cure for Corporate Stupidity,” the problem may not be a lack of thinking, but rather, thinking that is thrown of off by bugs, or more specifically, “Mind-bugs.”
Author Larry J. Bloom, identified on the book cover as a “recovering CEO,” spent more than 30 years helping to grow Bio-Lab Inc. from a small family business to a $700 million subsidiary of a public company.
Mind-bugs, his trademarked term, is defined as a metaphor for problems that all people experience in their thinking, partly, he says, because humans are hard-wired for survival.
No matter the professional role, it’s likely that making decisions is an important part of the workweek for most people. Of course, the higher up the ladder the decision maker is, the more impact the choice will probably have, but it seems that making wiser decisions could be beneficial across the board.
According to Bloom, there are 20 Mind-bugs that exist in four dimensions: sufficiency, accuracy, beliefs and social, and Bloom gives situational examples for each of the bugs. Here’s a quick peek at one bug from each category.
- Sufficiency – Shooting the critics, which is the practice of marginalizing those who disagree with us.
- Accuracy – Data rejection, which is reflexive rejection of new facts simply because they contradict existing norms.
- Beliefs – Competency blindness, which is believing others are competent – or not – when it suits our subconscious needs.
- Social – Rose-colored glasses, which is overestimating the likelihood of positive events because everyone in the group believes they will happen.
The book covers a lot of ground, but Bloom does a decent job of compartmentalizing the material so readers can choose to focus on specific sections. Not only does the book start with a summary chapter titled “If You Only Read One Chapter, This is It,” there also are charts and an index, so it’s not difficult to jump in and out of the book or follow a specific topic throughout.
Bloom maintains that business leaders often spend more time fixing decisions that go awry than working to make correct decisions in the first place.
“If we don’t practice Mind-bug detection, the Mind-bug thought patterns may sneak up and bite us. Then we will make decisions that cause harm to ourselves and others or destroy our value in our company and never even know why,” he writes.
Bloom also outlines several behaviors that are evidence of buggy thinking and can lead to corporate stupidity. Among them:
- We believe we have figured out the way things are, regardless of evidence to the contrary, and we fail to grasp the contradictions between our views and reality.
- We justify conclusions that serve our interests and develop skills of selective evidence-finding and debate.
- We develop complex, defensive and inflexible habits that are not discussable. Worse, to consider discussing them is not discussable.
- We are blind to our own limitations and blind to the fact that we are blind.
Once we’re willing to accept that anybody can fall prey to Mind-bugs, Bloom’s solution seems overly simple, in that all we really need to do is take control of our thinking. The problem, he says, is that we – or our thoughts – get in the way. The good news is that he gives tips for avoiding Mind-bugs, and he outlines a six-step process to making better decisions and leaving corporate stupidity behind.
There are some segments of the book that I found more difficult to track than others, but his research and insights are worth the exploration. Start reading and decide for yourselves whether your mind – or your workplace – has an infestation that needs to be eradicated.[[In-content Ad]]
