Obliged to be Stupid

Dr. Robert B. Smith was born in 1950, four years before formal wartime rationing ended, to working-class parents in Birkenhead, a ship-building town in the north-west of England. He was a rare exception, winning one of five scholarships at the age of eleven to Birkenhead School, a UK public school (in reality a private, fee-paying school), in 1961 — a surprising outcome given that he had fallen out, in a big way, with the formal UK education system on his very first day at infants' school. He left Birkenhead School at seventeen years of age. A self-confessed systems thinker, he holds a BA (Hons) in Fine Arts from Wolverhampton University, UK; an MA in European Cultural Planning from De Montfort University, Leicester, UK; and a Ph.D. in Leadership & Executive Management from Pacific Cambria University, California, USA. He is a Fellow of the Chartered Management Institute (UK), an academic, a social and digital media content creator, mentor, writer and producer.