According to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report, one of the people who may have saved President Donald Trump from committing obstruction of justice is former White House counsel Don McGahn, thanks to his failure to obey Trump's orders to fire Mueller.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the House Judiciary Committee chairman, has subpoenaed testimony from McGahn.
On Boston Public Radio Tuesday, Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn argued that, from a general business standpoint, dissent can actually be an asset.
"It's more about deftness than grand proclamation," she said. "Leaders that make the effort, and organizations that create the culture in which a variety of viewpoints are encouraged, particularly those that don't go with company lines, or that are not what the CEO or the president wants, tend to enjoy more successful outcomes in what they're trying to do."
Koehn cited former President John F. Kennedy's management of the core, diverse team that dealt with the Cuban missile crisis.
"Ethically, strategically, often financially, organizationally, it's a very good choice. It's just hard," Koehn said.
Koehn offered a number of things everyone can do to encourage healthy, thoughtful and reasonable dissent, but noted that cultural shifts often come from company or organizational leadership.
"Slow down and wait until your emotional temperature lowers, because we rarely make our best decisions ... when our emotional temperature is very high," she said. "You choose who you're going to offer the dissent to, and the case behind it, very very carefully. You may not want to drop some kind of ethical, technological, strategic, organizational bomb, in a meeting with, say, the highest person in the room, you may want to take it offline and do it in the hallway or over a pot of coffee, or one on one with a very particular person."
Koehn is an historian at the Harvard Business School, where she holds the James E. Robinson chair of Business Administration. Her latest book is "Forged in Criss: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times."
