Book review: "Surrounded by Idiots" by Thomas Erikson

July 30, 2026

The subtitle of this book is "The four types of human behaviour and how top effectively communicate with each in business (and in life)". A very bold claim, and based on its own idiocy that people can be partitioned into fixed and inflexible categories.

Back in the 1980s Edward de Bono came up with the concept of "The six thinking hats" and it was difficult to attend a business training seminar without this nonsense being mentioned. Sometimes we even had to wear the hats. At least it gave us something to laugh about in the pub afterwards.

This book seems to be a retread of that idea, but with a different method of dividing up humanity. It probably has as much relevance to reality as de Bono's ideas, but the danger is that management might take it seriously and use it to categorise staff and influence promotions (or even hiring).

Here are the different colours that supposedly identify character traits which can be used to group people..

The image below from inside the back cover of the book tells you all you need to know about the "theory". The colours should form an overlapping Venn diagram, because nobody is exclusively one "colour".

A very large proportion of my working life was spent as a consultant, which gave me a lot of insight into how management works and in many cases how companies survive idiocy in the ranks. I didn't need to use different colours to identify the idiots - they sat behind desks and talked nonsense at meetings. One day I'll finish my own book about how companies keep going despite sabotage by idiots, and I promise not to mention colours.

I studied at graduate management school (that old MBA thing) and there is a constant search for the next magic bullet that will transform management. This is probably not it, and almost certainly another "one size fits all" solution to classifying people will come along in the future, complete with books and training guides. As they say in the classics "Rinse, repeat".

See also: If you think that putting people into categories which determine how they are treated is harmless fun, have a look at School Daze.

Would I recommend this book? It might be useful if you are an incompetent manager or employment agent who is looking a for a shortcut to box-ticking for handling or selecting staff but it tells you nothing about human psychology (and yes, I studied psychology before going on to business school).

And is Edward de Bono mentioned in the book? Don't ask silly questions.

There is a copy at Oberon Library. Leave it there.