If you want anyone to pay attention to you in meetings, don't ever preface your opposition to a proposal by saying: “Just to play devil's advocate . . .” If you disagree with something, just say it and hold your ground until you're convinced otherwise. There are many such useful ideas in Charlan Nemeth's “In Defense of Troublemakers,” her study of dissent in life and the workplace. But if this one alone takes hold, it could transform millions of meetings, doing away with all those mushy, consensus-driven hours wasted by people too scared of disagreement or power to speak truth to gibberish. Not only would better decisions get made, but the process of making them would vastly improve.
As Ms. Nemeth demonstrates, peer pressure can be a major motivator in business. Marketers use majority opinion to staggering effect, and recommendations prompt our natural instinct to follow the herd, nonsensically sometimes. (Just think of Amazon's “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” feature.) But for management, peer pressure can lead to bad ideas going unchallenged as people fear that disagreement could imperil their jobs.
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