My blog called the Smell of Good Business is along similar business topic lines to yours - please take a look and I’d be interested in your feedback http://justindavies.wordpress.com/

I particularly like putting the pics of business books on the right hand side that you have done here. Keep up the good work…

And yes, with that question I was opening up the door to say that I’m one of those people. I am horrible at dealing with any educational institution. I’ve gotta slog thru things on my own. I’m just too impatient to learn at other people’s pace or to have to curb my interest in another topic. What this has resulted in for my life is a very successful career as an interactive designer. I taught myself every programming language and graphics application I could get my hands on.

Meanwhile, old friends of mine who have actually gone to school and gotten “Web Design” degrees constantly ask me how to work a specific program or figure out a problem, and the most common excuse for not knowing how to do it themselves is “they didn’t teach that.” The same went for most of the schooled designers I worked with. They just relied on the skills that they learned in college and were not constantly trying to learn in order to have their skillset keep pace with newer trends, even if just to be aware of them.

This same trait has been exhibited in most of my more troublesome managers. They simply don’t know how to do something, are completely incurious as to the process and just heap all the knowledge and understanding on someone else to “help” them. All this does is frustrate whoever’s saddle with the mope, especially if the manager is the one who’s got to deal with the client, all the while talking about a project which he/she has NONE of the skills or understanding to produce themselves.

This seems to gone off your main point on common sense, but I think my point was to say that while common sense is a big factor in a manager’s effectiveness, but so is intellectual laziness or a complete lack of ambition.