Cruising through Twitter I saw a references from a piece by Rajesh Setty on “Why Don’t Smart People Share?” It seemed to be a continuation of my own frequent question — why won’t smart people listen? My conclusion is that we in the high tech world have made being smart a trap.

I can hear the moaning….But I have seen this issue play out over and over. First of all, ask anyone in high tech for their impressions of someone else — they always start with “he (or she) is really smart…” So if “being smart” is the most critical criteria for being well thought of, the perception must be protected at all costs!

But somehow we have started defining “smart” as “knows all the answers”. And so showing how smart you are entails always being the one who is right, who is the smartest. This means that you can never listen, or learn from someone else, or change your mind once you have declared yourself, or follow someone’s else’s idea, or say “I was wrong”. As a friend of mine once said “I HAVE to have the answer, so I will say something even if I know it is wrong. And once I have said it, I have to defend it to the death so I don’t have to admit I didn’t know”.

Now, what happens when you put all those smart people together in a company? First of all, it gets really hard to have an open discussion if everyone has to be right. It is even harder to make a decision if going with someone else’s idea means conceding that they are smarter than you. It means people hiding the fact that they are overwhelmed in their jobs because they don’t know everything and are afraid it is showing weakness if they ask for help. (This seems to be especially true of CEO’s, who feel like they have to keep up this facade of all-knowingness even with the Board…and Board members who think they have to prove their value as venture capitalists by always knowing what the company SHOULD do.)

So we have a company where energy that should go into cooperatively solving the hard problem the company has taken on instead goes into trying to maintain the impression of smartness.

How much better would it be if we just acknowledged that the smartest people are those who are confident in what they know — and acknowledge that no one can know everything about everything. These people who accept they are “smart enough” know to bring in other people who have different strengths, to ask those people to share their honest opinions…and then to listen!

The Buddhist’s have a tradition of the kalyana-mitra, or Noble Friend. This concept is based on the belief that every organism (and an organization is an organism) has blind spots. The Nobel Friend is someone who “will not accept pretension but will gently and very firmly confront you with your own blindness”.

Doesn’t every person need at least one Noble Friend? Wouldn’t you rather hear the truth from someone who cares about you, someone whose desire is to help you succeed, someone who has no agenda other than to help you be the best you can be?

So as we begin 2010 I wish for all of you — CEOs, Board members, VPs — that you will seek out at least one Noble Friend. I hope that you will trust what you know, and trust your own capability to keep learning, to keep growing. And I hope you will not let the need to prove you are smart keep you from being successful.