The Stupidity Paradox: The Power and Pitfalls of Functional Stupidity at Work

Based on what is still only my cursory view, this book strikes me as not only quite interesting, important and much-needed, it's more than that. Reading it, one finds example after example of what we face every day in our ordinary lives. The book treats the general uses of deliberate retreats into mind-numbing stupidity as an unfortunately useful coping mechanism in so much of contemporary life. It's also a virtual 'travel-log' and guide to the amazing but routine stupidity which is rife at this very site's own discussion groups. Library Thing is clearly a model example of the key points made in The Stupidity Paradox.

Read it and weep--literally.

A sceptical look at how modern organizations work. Some of the points I liked the most:

- a lot of what is called knowledge work isn't in fact very complicated or knowledge-intensive
- fancy titles can make boring jobs bearable
- documenting what you do has become more important than the actual doing and the results
- having a "positive mindset" can mean that problems are ignored
- not questioning what you do, or why, at work can make you feel good about work, and make things run more smoothly (even if what you do is stupid).

Although a bit repetitive, I liked how the others question a lot of established practices in organizations. There are also 285 references to studies illustrating their points.

As very often happens with management books, a very good idea - functional stupidity as the core competence of contemporary business organizations - reiterated for 200 pages and used to re-frame more common organizational problems. Anyway, still a good idea.