According to the idiom, a fool and his money are soon parted, so you might think the only thing we can learn from one is not to be like him. Surely he's an idiot, a dolt, an utter nincompoop and completely useless?
Not so. Because the fool, in his original guise as a key figure on tarot cards (and his close relative, the joker in a deck of playing cards), can often be anything his holder desires. So if you do happen to employ a man who turns up for work wearing either a full-on medieval jester costume or, in his tarot guise, as a beggar carrying his belongings on a stick, running away from a dog that has bitten his pants, he can be used to your advantage.
Of course he's not one for anywhere with a strict dress code (for example, patients tend to react badly to doctors who turn up for work dressed as vagrants or historical 'comedians'), so you're more likely to find him in creative industries or at least something non-client facing.
The thing about the fool, of course, is that he is literally a wild card, and can therefore be incredibly useful or catastrophically dangerous to your business and must be handled with extreme care. He is the sort who spews out an endless stream of ideas and opinions, the huge majority of which are arrant nonsense. But every so often, he will come up with some innocent truism or naive idea that turns out to be brilliant. Not that he knows it — in his mind all his thoughts (such as they are) are equal.
Or perhaps he is the genius and it is we who are the lesser person. Father of psychoanalysis Carl Jung once said: "If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool." (Although to be fair he probably said it in German.)
Either way, a man with a comedy tie and a tiresome 'sense of humour' may have something to offer if you hire him. But only if you have a separate office...
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