One must take under consideration the definition of "smart" first.
I had a co-worker who had memorized a raftload of facts without actually understanding many of them. She frequently mis-diagnosed problems with customer computers because although she had a huge list of facts in her head, she couldn't think her way through them to make sense of what was really going on.
Due to her ability to spew facts on demand however, the management thought she was exceptionally smart, even though she couldn't actually figure anything out for herself.
The company's hierarchy reinforced this sort of thing, because the "engineering" team was a bunch of college dropouts who didn't have the faintest idea as to how things like UNIX networking worked. They said that total memory = physical + virtual, so my attempts to explain that UNIX doesn't work like that went unheard, and customer machines continued to suffer because they didn't have enough memory to serve their buyers' needs.
The last I heard the company had something like a 4% customer satisfaction rate.
