13 August

I’ve worked at a few large organisations, and something that never works is the idea of having everybody in the company unified. Mission statements and visions and values and plans are supposed to bring people together, but overwhelmingly in my experience people think that stuff is meaningless bullshit. Here’s an idea I reckon would be worth a try. Large organisations should have an opposition, as in politics. Maybe even led by an opposition CEO. It could be done in various ways but the basic idea being that decisions of the organisation have to be debated, and voted upon at the end of the debate. At the moment organisations have a veneer of unity, under one leadership team and Board, but it’s nonsense, a lot of company time is spent debating what the leadership is doing anyway, so why not make debate the core of the company? Have the big company ideas and decisions debated forcefully, get it all out on the table, with power to both sides of each argument, not just one.