MAY 11, 2022 • VOL. 20 ISSUE 19

Hi John,

Deference to authority: Necessary for a functioning organization? Or detrimental to one? Share your thoughts in today’s article from Kerry Patterson.

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KERRYING ON: THE TWO FACES OF DEFERENCE

by Kerry Patterson

Deference: Submission or courteous yielding to the opinion, wishes, or judgment of another.

One day while waiting for my car to be repaired, I asked Leo, the repair shop’s head honcho, why his crew members kept coming to him with questions.

“It’s simple,” he explained. “They aren’t as good at diagnosing as I am. Never will be. So every time they can’t figure out what to do they ask me, I tell them, and then they do it. The truth is, I know just about everything there is to know about their jobs and they don’t. That’s why I’m the boss and they aren’t.”

As I watched the crew in action, it turned out that Leo did know just about everything. He also may be one of the last all-knowing bosses in America.
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"When an intelligent person expresses a view which seems to us obviously absurd, we should not attempt to prove that it is somehow true [or untrue], but we should try to understand how it ever came to SEEM true. This exercise of … imagination at once enlarges the scope of our thinking and helps us to realize how foolish many of our own cherished prejudices will seem.”
 

—Bertrand Russell
 
 

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