In the newsrooms, boardrooms and tearooms of Britain there is a great mistake being made. In decades of reporting about the city and government, the most widespread belief I have come across is that somewhere there is a group of people who know what they are doing. This group has the answer for to how best to run the economy, how to run a bank, how to put Ikea cabinets together without screaming and perhaps even how to make a traffic warden smile. When things go wrong, people don't just feel disappointed. They feel let down, betrayed and swindled because they feel that our leaders knew what to do to make things better but failed to do the right thing. Either they didn't care enough or were looking after their own interests rather than the general good.
Where is the room with all the clever people in it?
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In other words, people believe that things go wrong, not because of an honest mistake but because of wilful neglect. Speaking to an ex-party whip recently, he told me he always felt there was a room in parliament where all the clever people worked. Once you got into that room, you would know all the secrets of how things worked and what to do about them. Trying their best The truth, as the politician found out, is that there is no room of clever people in parliament or indeed in the City. It is not that the lunatics are in charge of the asylum - perhaps more worryingly, the truth is that we are in charge of the asylum. The nearer you get to the centres of power, the more you realise that behind the twitching curtain, the Wizards of Oz are frighteningly like the rest of us. They are trying to do their best and although they are clever, they no more comprehend the answers to the world than the rest of us. This is not just a question of business and political leaders pretending to be cleverer than they are. We are all complicit in the deceit. We don't want to hear that our leaders are just trying their best. We don't want to hear a manifesto or business plan that says it doesn't know what to do, but will give it a good go. We, the public, want our leaders to pretend they know the way. In other words, we'd rather get lost by a driver who is filled with confidence than get lost with a driver who admits he doesn't know the way at the start of the journey. These were my thoughts recently for a number of reasons.
Albert Einstein - more of a claim to know it all than most
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Sir Win Bishoff was named recently as the new head of the Lloyds Banking Group. There was much debate about whether he was the man with all the answers to the banks problems. The prime minister has been the focus of questions surrounding whether he knows what he is doing for some time. Perhaps I was also obsessing about how much people should know, because I am the business and politics judge in a new BBC Two show called Know It Alls, in which contestants have to talk about a subject I give them to show off their knowledge and insight. To all the contestants in that show, to the politicians who run the country and the bosses who lead the boardrooms, it's worth recalling the thoughts of Albert Einstein - more entitled than most to enter the room of clever people. He also thought that knowledge wasn't the answer to everything. "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create."
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