What Were They Thinking?

Acknowledgments

This book came into being through a series of accidental events. In the fall of 2002, Josh Quittner, the new editor at Business 2.0, whom I had met at a dinner a few months previously, sent me an e-mail asking if I was interested in being a management columnist at the magazine.

As it turns out, I had actually wanted to be a columnist, mostly because I saw so much discussion in the press and on television of both corporate and world events that struck me as singularly uninformed by the research literature in organizational behavior and social psychology. And I saw lots of companies doing lots of things that made absolutely no sense based on that literature and on logical analysis.

So, I replied in the affirmative to Josh, and ...