I saw the amazing power of dissent in an exercise I was running with a group of executives in China. Forty executives, all men, were sitting at four tables of ten. After watching a short video, their task was to determine, as a table group, how many sails an old-fashioned sailing ship in the video had up. They had two minutes. I observed the tables. Not knowing the language, I focused on who spoke in what order and the body language. The tables were close together, but I did not observe any cross talk between tables. When it was time to share their answers, an executive from the first table
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