Power, Knowledge and Dissent: Why It's Tough at the Top For the 21st Century CEO

A CEO can do the best job he or she can but in the end it may not be enough. Three factors in particular make the CEO’s job so difficult -- the social rather than the individual nature of knowledge, the relational rather than possessive nature of power, and the difficulty of securing feedback that resembles constructive dissent rather than destructive consent. These authors discuss each of these factors.