Entrepid

Chip and Dan Heath, authors of “Made to Stick” have an article in this month’s Fast Company titled “Success Can Make You Stupid.”

“If there’s a moral in this story, it’s this: Question success. Success propagates backward in our minds and bestows the glow of wisdom on our every decision. The irony of self-fulfilling prophecies is that even bad ideas end up looking right in the end, because we’ve salvaged them with good execution. And when bad ideas get reinforced, there are consequences: The wrong movies get pushed. The wrong deals get funded. The wrong employees get advanced.”

Chip and Dan describe a process whereby bias toward past successful decisions results in more resources being directed to what is comfortable and known, rather than what is more objectively “right.”

Read the whole thing.