Then I read “Teaching Smart People How To Learn,” which argued trenchantly and compellingly that really smart people have the hardest time learning. They are so very smart that they are also very “brittle,” to use Argyris’s descriptor. When something goes wrong, rather than reflect on what they might have done to contribute to the error, they look entirely outside themselves for the causes and blame outside forces — irrational clients, impossible time pressure, lack of adequate resources, shifts beyond their control. Rather than learn from error, they doom themselves to repeat them.

Before reading the article, I would have been inclined to finish that last sentence with “despite being so very smart.” After the article, my conclusion was “because they are so very smart.”

— Roger Martin, Dean, Rotman School of Management at University of Toronto