Text 1 Last week I had lunch with a man who used to be one of the most senior bankers in the UK. The trouble with business today, he complained over coffee, was that there was no common sense any more. Such sense, he insisted, had always been uncommon-- but now was extinct. The reason common sense is squashed in this way is insecurity. Most people in business live in fear of being found out foolish and sounding clever seems a safer bet than being understood. As more people try to sound clever, the standard gets tougher, and before long formerly sensible people start talking absolute rot. Recently I read an interview with a senior manager at Amazon in which he explained the secret to his hiring success: “Your bar raiser should also run the debrief after every hiring loop.” The next enemy of common sense is self-importance, which not only makes business people lose the plot at work, but at home too. On LinkedIn the other day a former chief operating officer of eBay boasted that he was so busy that he bought a house without even looking at it properly, and that his wife once delivered clean underwear to the office after he had worked all night. A five-year old could have told him that this is no way to live, and that if you are caught without clean underpants, or end up buying a house having hardly looked at it, it is better to keep quiet. Human weakness is not the only destroyer of common sense; the corporate machine does so equally powerfully. Departments such as HR and PR routinely eliminate any lurking pools of rationality, while interdepartmental rivalries, budgets and regulations of any kind all tend to ensure that few things are ever done sensibly. The only way of safeguarding common sense in business is to grow your own, and become an entrepreneur. A couple of months ago I helped judge a competition for new business. One of the winners made charging points for electric cars; another had developed a sort of Netflix for magazines. Both were good ideas, with good business plans and founders who spoke lucidly about what they were doing. I don’t know if either will succeed. But I do know that if they do, their good sense will be under attack.