anti-intellectualism

Driving (or rather being driven) up to Leeds this evening I was asked about different adoption rates for new ideas. I responded that one of the major problems in the US and the UK is the anti-intellectualism of a majority of management. They don’t want to handle a concept, and have an proclivity to simple easy to understand solutions. All these despite dealing with high levels of uncertainty and situations where tradition simplistic recipe book approaches have failed. In Asia if I use a word which is unfamiliar they ask me to explain it, in the UK they dismiss it as jargon. If you speak to French, Italian or Spanish managers they have all studied philosophy at school. At my son’s school the worst insult is swot. We seem to be breeding for ignorance rather than for innovation.