Are you surrounded by irrational blockheads?

I admire Jason Fried, co-founder of 37 signals (37signals.com) a lot. His management theories are very simple to understand and hence easy to follow. They taste bitter for people who have been following astronomical, corporate lessons.

I have been lately working on a couple of consulting assignments, helping customers to strategize their BI landscape. I have taken up this principle not to give my customers too much of "visioning" masala and keep the strategy as simple and as worldly as possible. No bloat. Just give them what is required and what is implementable. My experiment gave me 50% success rate. But it gave me a 100% success rate in identifying a lot of irrational jackasses around me. How? Simple. They just couldn't understand simple things. When things were complicated and swollen, they loved it. When things were simple, they hated it. So what do you do with such blockheads? Ignore them? No. You can't. They are all around you.
Fire them? No. You can't. They are the heap in the organization.
Love them? No. You can't. You are smart and you will naturally hate them.
I decided to let them know they are imbecile, straight on their face. I decided to hurt their ego. I decided to make them feel that they are adding spam to the conversations. In this process, I was perceived to be arrogant. Who cares?

Is lateral learning an investment or an obligation?

I was interviewing one of my colleagues for an engineering position in my labs group. In fact, it started out as a request from my end to join this elite group. This group focuses on experimenting new features of a product and discovers business scenarios that would fit the bill for that particular feature. This group also fixates on identifying & abstracting reusable design patterns, which then can be serviced to various projects for specific implementations. Sounds interesting? I believed so, but my fellow colleagues didn't feel so.

The reason. "I have my project tasks to accomplish which fills in most of my day's time. I wont have time to contribute to this cause". I wondered why is it a cause. Then I realized the equation was about relating time spent to perceivable returns (appraisal comments). They felt learning a new feature outside the scope of a project was a very bad bargain. They felt it was an obligation that they were doing to the community and not to themselves.

When will the IT professionals realize that "lateral learning" (learning outside the scope of the project) is an investment to their own professional growth and not an obligation to their organization?