Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities

by Adam Kahane

Organizational authoritarianism also produces silence and subservience, through coercion, seduction, and corruption. I once worked on an innovation project with the management team of a successful Fortune 100 communications company. Its founder and CEO was a brilliant man, and a bully. His very highly paid senior managers admired and feared him. They spent a lot of their time looking over their shoulders, worrying about how to keep him happy and panicking when they heard that he wasn’t. They would second-guess themselves, skirting areas where they knew he had strong views, start down one path, and then suddenly change course if he frowned on it. This is the corporate version of the apartheid syndrome: management of a complex system by force and fear. Business writer Harriet Rubin once said to me that it surprised her that people were willing to accept being free citizens on the street but serfs at work.