Dunno

If human beings are bad at saying, "I'm sorry," they are even worse a saying "I don't know." Most people will have had an experience with a boss who was really baaaad at this. The archetypal Alpha boss (of either sex) seems to have a particular problem with admitting ignorance. On the surface this cannot seem anything but dumb.

In his Metalogicon (1159), John of Salisbury wrote:

"Bernard of Chartres used to say that we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness on sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size." (This standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants analogy was later attributed to Isaac Newton.)

A rule of thumb in business is to hire people who are smarter than you. Take that to its logical extreme: The CEO hires Vice Presidents who are smarter than him/her and the VPs hire Department Heads who are smarter than them and the Dept Heads hire Managers … Pretty soon the CEO is going to be the dumbest person in the building. So, nice idea but it rarely seems to work out that way. Why? Because most bosses hate saying, "I don't know." Logically then, they are standing on the shoulders of pygmies.

The human (and particularly male) fear of admitting ignorance or of saying, “I was wrong” goes back, as so many other things do, to the caves. To admit ignorance, to admit that you are wrong, is to, in effect say, “I am not a particularly useful member of the tribe. I don’t know where the valley with the wildebeest is." Or "I took a wrong turn and brought the hunting party to the wrong valley and there were no wildebeest there …”

I suspect that this accounts for the fact that no man likes asking for directions, no matter how late or how lost he is - particularly if there is someone in the car with him. It probably also accounts for the fact that Fortune 500 CEOs are of above average height. Malcolm Gladwell:

"In the US population, about 14.5% of all men are six feet or over. Among CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, that number is 58%. Even more strikingly, in the general American population, 3.9% of adult men are 6'2" or taller. Among my CEO sample, 30% were 6'2" or taller. ... Of the tens of millions of American men below 5'6", a grand total of ten - in my sample - have reached the level of CEO ..."

Now, when you live in a cave among hunter-gatherers, being tall, strong and imposing are probably fairly good selection criteria for your chief. But now? In a post-industrial, globalised, knowledge society? It would seem that society still lionises and fetes good hunters - we pay sports stars immense amounts of money and we promote tall people ... because they're tall. In that society, you will not, you cannot, hear the words, "I don't know" too often ...

(For the benefit of any Boards of Management or Executive Headhunters who may be reading, I am 6'0" tall, I can speak in coherent sentences and I have a full, thick, head of hair which is well on its way to being salt-and-pepper grey.)