We shall always seek agreement to take better decisions
To make good decisions, CEOs need the courage to seek out disagreement. Alfred Sloan, the longtime CEO and chairman of General Motors, once interrupted a committee meeting with a question: “Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here?” All the committee members nodded. “Then,” Sloan said, “I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what this decision is about”.
Examples ()
Your example
[Oprah Winfrey said in one of the interview she was giving :]
"There’s a wonderful phrase by Maya Angelou, from a poem that she wrote called “To our grandmothers”, that she says:
“I come as one, but I stand as ten thousand.”
So when I walk into a room, particularly before I have something really challenging to do, or I’m going to be in a circumstance where I feel I’m going to be you know, up against some difficulties. I will literally sit, and I will call on the 10,000."
Note : the actual phrase in the poem is : "I go forth along, and stand as ten thousand."
The Brook's law states that when a person is added to a project team, and the project is already late, the project time is longer, rather than shorter. Brooks’ law is recognized as applicable to any complex endeavor involving lots of people interacting together, not just software engineering.
Harvard neuroscientists Jason Mitchell and Diana Tamir found that disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding. In one study, Mitchell and Tamir hooked subjects up to brain scanners and asked them to share either their own opinions and attitudes (“I like snowboarding”) or the opinions and attitudes of another person (“He likes puppies”). They found that sharing personal opinions activated the same brain circuits that respond to rewards like food and money. So talking about what you did this weekend might feel just as good as taking a delicious bite of double chocolate cake.
We need to think about failure differently.
I’m not the first to say that failure, when approached properly, can be an opportunity for growth. But the way most people interpret this assertion is that mistakes are a necessary evil. Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all.
They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and, as such, should be seen as valuable; without them, we’d have no originality). And yet, even as I say that embracing failure is an important part of learning, I also acknowledge that acknowledging this truth is not enough.
That’s because failure is painful, and our feelings about this pain tend to screw up our understanding of its worth. To disentangle the good and the bad parts of failure, we have to recognize both the reality of the pain and the benefit of the resulting growth.
