One would expect a survey of SMEs to capture the chaos, panic, gloom and despair of the covid crisis, but one conducted just before the lockdown drew a blank from respondents One of the thrills of being an academic and researcher in a business school is the ringside view offered into the human mind and its proclivity to behave predictably “irrationally".
Time and again, I muse on the sheer brilliance of Dan Ariely’s use of the term in his book by the same title, as yet another encounter with the group I mostly work with—family-run businesses in India’s small and medium enterprise (SME) sector—confirms and confounds these behavioural quirks.