Published on Career Center on ClassifiedPost.com

Bright people, dumb actions

In some quarters, a view persists that the financial meltdown of 2008 was somehow unavoidable. It is a notion, though, that Professor Jeffrey Gandz, of the Richard Ivey School of Business, is keen to scotch.

In the book Leadership on Trial, written with three Ivey colleagues, Gandz pinpoints the failures - systemic and individual - that created a crisis many warned about and did see coming.

Rightly, he focuses attention on those at the top who led the charge headlong into disaster. But the aim was to go beyond the neat and easy explanations that too often just put the blame on "greedy bankers" and the bonus culture. He searched for the underlying causes that can and must be fixed.

"A number of these organisations had gone down a very destructive pathway in terms of shareholder value and social [consequences]," Gandz says. "Something had gone very wrong in l