I’ll admit it: I was a high school and college debater. Those were formative years and many lessons I learned have stayed with me. Perhaps the most important is the value of vigorous debate. Looking for ways to defeat your colleagues’ arguments. We believed that if an argument could survive our practice, it had an excellent chance to survive in the tournaments when rounds were won and lost for real. The arguments about arguments were loud, raucous and at times vicious. But never personal. After arguing like crazy, we were still best friends.
I was reminded of this lesson as I continue to read Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done. Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan make the point that as a leader, “you’re trying to promote the ability to intellectually debate important points. It doesn’t matter who wins and who loses. The fact that the debate happened and resolution occurred is good in itself.”
I think that is going too far. Debate points by themselves don’t count for anything in the real world. But the ability of crisp intellectual critique of an idea is bound to expose weaknesses in the idea, lead to a better idea or generate confidence in the new idea. Each of these is an inherently valuable outcome.
Blogging serves this purpose outside law firms. But inside firms, I don’t hear much about vigorous debate about firm matters. Shouldn’t there be?