Why Great Leaders Don’t Take Yes for an Answer
Managing for Conflict and Consensus
One of the Top Ten Business Books of 2005 by The Globe and Mail
No more ‘yes-men’! How leaders can get the real truth, build real consensus, and drive real action.
Executives hear ‘yes’ far too often. Their status and power inhibits candid dialogue. They don’t hear bad news until it’s too late. They get group think, not reality. They think they’ve achieved consensus, then find their decisions undermined or derailed by colleagues who never really bought in. They become increasingly isolated; even high-risk or illegal actions can begin to go unquestioned. Inevitable? Absolutely not.
In Why Great Leaders Don’t Take Yes for an Answer, Harvard Business School Professor Michael Roberto shows you how to promote honest, constructive dissent and skepticism . . . use it to improve your decisions . . . and then align your entire organisation to fully support the decisions you make. Drawing on his extensive research on executive decision-making, Roberto shows how to test and probe the members of your management team . . . discover when ‘yes’ means ‘yes’ and when it doesn’t . . . and build real, deep consensus that leads to action.
Along the way, Roberto offers important new insights into managing teams, mitigating risk, promoting corporate ethics through effective governance, and much more. Your organization and your executive team have immense untapped wisdom: this book will help you tap that wisdom to the fullest.
Prentice Hall; 1 edition (6 Jun 2005)
