Last month’s column described the dangers of “keeping up with the Joneses” and how businesses seeking to do so have suffered disastrous consequences. I mentioned two corollaries: the risk of blindly following supposed best practices, and of buying into “groupthink.” We explored the former risk in detail last month; this month I want to turn to the latter.
Earlier this year, Yale University economics professor Robert Shiller wrote about how panels of experts can still make colossal mistakes, and he pointed to the 1972 book “Groupthink” by Yale psychologist Irving Janis. The book, Shiller says, explains that people on ...