The Problem With Telling Your Board What They Want to Hear

The Problem With Telling Your Board What They Want to Hear0:00/680.4481×Most directors believe they want candour from their chief executive. Most chief executives believe they provide it. Both are often wrong, and the delta between what is said in boardrooms and what is actually happening in the organisations below them is one of the more reliable predictors of strategic failure in corporate life. The research on this is unambiguous. Information flowing upward through a hierarchy is systematically softened at each layer; dissenting directors are quietly marginalised by their peers; high-status CEOs are subjected to enough flattery and opinion conformity so that belief in their unerring strategic judgement inflates in proportion to the contraction of dissenting opinion. The result is an organisation whose account of itself, by the time it reaches the board papers, has been through more edits than a political memoir.The oldest and most instructive treatment of this problem is not in a…