Selected for Silence

The last essay ended on a concession, and I owe the reader a proper account of it. I had described a sequence of decisions—appoint on the visible signal, buy the training that produces a document, deploy the tool that raises productivity—and treated the deference that followed as an accident nobody intended. That account was, on sober reflection, too generous. Some of the deference is accidental and we should be leery to presume nefarious motives when naïvety is the true cause. However, not all of the deference is accidental; authoritarian leadership is strong with many organisations.This essay concerns itself with the part of the deference process that is not accidental. My argument is that some organisations do not merely fail to develop judgement in the people they appoint. They actively select against it, because a person who exercises judgement is a person who will, sooner or later, tell an executive they are wrong, and there are organisations in which that is the one thing that…