Why Do Some Americans Speak So Confidently When They Have No Clue What They're Talking About? [View all]

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http://www.alternet.org/corporate-accountability-and-workplace/leadership-training-or-bullshit-training-harvard-price-pseudo



The Harvard Business School information session on how to be a good class participant instructs, “Speak with conviction. Even if you believe something only 55 percent, say it as if you believe it 100 percent,” Susan Cain reported in her bestselling book Quiet. At HBS, Cain noticed, “If a student talks often and forcefully, then he’s a player; if he doesn’t, he’s on the margins.”

Cain observed that the men at HBS “look like people who expect to be in charge.... I have the feeling that if you asked one of them for driving directions, he’d greet you with a can-do smile and throw himself into the task of helping you to your destination — whether or not he knew the way.”

HBS alumni include George W. Bush, class of 1975, as well as:

Jamie Dimon, 1982, CEO and chairman of JP Morgan Chase

Grover Norquist, 1981, president of Americans for Tax Reform

Henry Paulson, 1970, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, former CEO of Goldman Sachs

Mitt Romney, 1975, former governor of Massachusetts, co-founder of Bain Capital

Jeffrey Skilling, 1979, former CEO of Enron, convicted of securities fraud and insider trading

People with great power over our lives, in government, business, medicine, and elsewhere, who don’t know what they are talking about are scary. Even more scary are people in authority who don’t know what they’re talking about but who have spent a lifetime perfecting how to appear like they do. Complete conviction and total certainty are sources of great power, especially over vulnerable and uncertain people. And so the pretense of conviction and certainty can be quite damaging.