Smart vs. Dumb

Question #1: Your business is down ten or fifteen percent, vs. last year. Is this because all of a sudden, we became dumb, or is this because of the economy?

Question #2: Your business thrived during the bubble years of mid-2003 to mid-2007. Did that happen because we were exceptionally smart, or did that happen because of the economy?

When we do a post-mortem on the implosion of capitalism, assuming there are any humans still working at the companies we manage, we'll need to parse out the role business smarts played during the updraft, and we'll need to parse out the role our lack of knowledge played in the collapse.