Preface

Much of my adult life has been spent rubbing shoulders with smart people. In college, in every job I’ve ever been in, in starting businesses, these smart people have been colleagues, bosses, peers, customers. I believe this experience is true not only of myself. More and more of us are finding our lives affected by these selfsame smart people and the things they make and do.

Over the years a suspicion has gradually been growing on me. It is a suspicion that I have been slow to voice. However, as the years have gone by, and as the evidence has accumulated, I have finally come to the conclusion that despite smartness, expertise, skill, experience, genius, in some cases some (many?) of these people are lacking in an essential skill.

That skill is what I refer to in this book as ‘common sense’.

‘The trouble with common sense,’ the old saw goes, ‘is that it’s not all that common.’ That has very much been my experience. Despite all the smarts that are floating around the place, a lot of dumb things get done. These are things which, if we only applied some of this pixie dust we call common sense, would never have been allowed to happen.

Smart people seem to like complicated – complicated ideas, complicated processes and methods, complicated solutions to problems. Nothing wrong with that necessarily, except that complicated often equals:

• expensive to implement and maintain;
• not necessarily taking into account the fact that there are people involved;
• not necessarily good or the best; and
• sometimes just plain … well, wrong.

It is against this background that I have written this little book. It sets down a number of rules of common sense. Rather than trying to define common sense, it tries to identify a bunch of things which, if one were doing them, one would be ‘using common sense’.

I have taught these rules to many, many people over the years and seen them achieve real benefits with them. The rules are applicable in any situation, whether in work or outside it, but the book focuses primarily on the workplace.

The ‘promise’ of the book is pretty simple. To a greater or a lesser extent, it will give you a new way of looking at the world. It will give you new ways of finding solutions to problems – ways which are both simple and fast. And if it stops you from doing some dumb things then that will have been a blessing indeed.