Blockbuster's CEO saw the future. He killed late fees, built a 2M-subscriber online business, and was beating Netflix. Then the board forced him out for "destroying shareholder value." Seeing the future is easy. Surviving the room that would rather not is the whole game.
Theranos assembled what Fortune called "the most illustrious board in U.S. corporate history."
They lacked the one thing every dissent mechanism requires: access to the information that would make challenge possible.
Episode 8 of the Tenth Man Podcast is out now. Link below.
@Layton_Gott Agreed. The newer models donโt always even feel sycophantic anymore. They build a clean, logical case on top of your premise without ever really stress-testing it.
You end up with:
Faster execution + unchallenged assumptions
The gap right now is how to force real disagreement.
New episode: The Obligation to Disagree.
Amazon built mechanisms to force challenge. Berkshire Hathaway concentrated the challenge function in one person for 50 years.
Both work, but have a structural vulnerability that every institution eventually hits.
Link in comments.
In April 1961, the most experienced foreign policy minds in America sat in a room and agreed to invade Cuba. The invasion failed in every dimension. Thirteen months later, facing Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, the same president redesigned the room.
https://t.co/T8NX0XNKg3
In 1968, your odds of dying on a commercial flight were 1 in 350k. By 2022, that number was 1 in 13.7 million. Aviation didn't get there by building better planes. It got there by building a system that treats every failure as information.
https://t.co/eTYba6qjeL
The Tenth Man Podcast Episode 1 is live on YouTube and Spotify.
This is the first episode of a ten-part series on how different domains - aviation, medicine, finance, diplomacy - have built dissent into their structures.
https://t.co/UP4KfYOyzl