Granted, the title of my “unorthodox management techniques” book, “Principles of Applied Stupidity,” sounds kind of silly, if not slightly offensive. So here is a brief explanation of why this would benefit your company, your organization, or yourself:
In the United States alone, we spend over $900 billion a year on “education.” Regardless of what is learned (or what is not learned), the upshot of all this spent money is that an awful lot of people spend an awful lot of time in the environment of a classroom, where one experiences “classroom conditioning.”
The Principles of Applied Stupidity are, among other things, something of an anthropological study of how classroom conditioning affects how people view the world, and how that common state-law-requires-it experience embeds certain ideas of intellectual morality (i.e., what is “right” and “wrong”– e.g., one great sin being the word “irregardless”) . If, on the other hand, you can gain some objectivity on how this training affects the majority of people you either work with or sell to, this will give you a sizable advantage in dealing with them.
While there is an awful lot to it, if I had to give you an elevator pitch, it’s about understanding our collective desire to be and look smart, and our terrible aversion to looking stupid. Once you realize that this is all a learned behavior, and our definitions of smart and stupid are rather arbitrary, and you start to see how these words are used to manipulate people (yourself included), this gives you much greater ability to manage any situation on an emotional level . It’s really about understanding human vulnerability, and how to engage with it to achieve a higher goal, rather than simply suppressing it in order to achieve obedience and uniformity.
It’s a fun book and series of talks, and it affords a wonderful degree of creative and intellectual freedom, as “embracing your inner idiot” will free you from an arbitrary system of morality that was instilled in your subconscious for purposes of making you do long division on sunny days.
To many people, this sounds blasphemous. They were trained to think this way, or rather, to have their rational minds overcome by these emotional reactions. But you don’t have to be afraid of the sin of stupidity anymore. Instead, you can put it to work for you.
© Justin Locke
