It’s not easy to bring questioning to companies; most of them weren’t built for it. American businesses in particular, and many major post–World War II European companies, “were designed on a military model that came out of the war, built by people who’d been through that war, and the businesses were organized around that mind-set,” Patnaik says. Central to that was the idea of a formal hierarchy and chain of command that didn’t leave much room for calling into question the accepted practices and procedures.
