Otherwise intelligent people can make terrible decisions. Think about decisions like these:

• Napoleon decided to invade Russia (and Hitler did it again 130 years later)
• An editor deciding to publish O.J Simpson’s If I Did It
• Chris Webber choosing the timeout he didn’t have in the 1993 Final Four
• NASA’s decision to ignore the O-ring issues on the Challenger
• President Kennedy’s famous blunder to continue the Bay of Pigs operation inherited from the previous administration (a mistake he quickly learned from)
• Margaret Thatcher deciding to get behind a “poll tax” that led to her ouster by her own party
• Juergen Schrempp, the CEO of Daimler-Benz, deciding to merge with Chrysler despite massive internal opposition and general history of big M&A deals working very poorly
• …and a hundred thousand more…

These were catastrophic decisions made by people who were, in some sense, professional decision-makers. They had impeccable credentials and judgment, and yet they made poor decisions due to poor judgment, a too-limited mental representations of the world, or just plain stupidity.

---

“The frog in the well knows nothing of the mighty ocean.”— Japanese Proverb

---