Have you got anything to do for the next two years?

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“Bozo explosion” is a term often used by Steve Jobs to describe the process by which a company, or a working group, quickly deteriorates when managers hire people who are less skilled and qualified than they are, thinking that this way they’ll avoid problems.

Bozos pay a lot of attention to social relations, they follow their boss’s same football team, to make a big show of working instead of actually working. At the same time bozos think of themselves as the ultimate geniuses in their field because they’re also subjected to the Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive distortion that often leads unintelligent people to think that they’re an unfairly undervalued reincarnation of Albert Einstein.

Once introduced into a working environment, bozos quickly multiply. If a B-level bozo tends to hire C-level bozos, the latter will take on D-level bozos, and soon the entire team will be irreparably compromised. If you’ve worked in a company chances are good that you know from experience the phenomenon of which I’m speaking, though perhaps you didn’t know that there is a specific expression to describe it.

I wrote this preamble to explain that we really don’t want bozos for the Digital Team of the Presidency of the Council — we really want the best people out there. We really do.

We’re perfectly willing to take on — so to speak — the related risks, because we think it’s an inescapable necessity. Our challenge is not one that we can face by patting each other’s backs and having a chat on Sundays. We need to create together the State’s “operating system,” a platform for the development of our country’s digital ecosystem: a project that we need to keep Italy in touch with the future.

You can read about who we’re looking for and what exactly we’ll do right here, while here is Diego’s introductory post.

And, rest assured, if you inwardly doubt for a moment that you’re really up to this task, it could be a very good sign.