What do leaders know?
28th May 2006
In the classic scene in A Few Good Men, Jack Nicholson, playing Colonel Jessep shouted, “You can’t handle the truth!” when grilled about the extent of military coverups, secrets and leadership knowledge about wrongdoings in a military base. The unspoken understanding, apparently, is that leaders have privileged access to the truth, so they have a responsibility to guard it, to act (or not act) upon it and only they are appropriately situated to appreciate it.
Leaving aside the questionability of this seemingly widespread assumption, I would like to ask a related question: what happens when leaders do not know the whole truth? What happens, that is, when the system fails them and they have lack of access to the information, or when those “in the know” hide the truth from them? Read the rest of this entry »
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