A good fight clears the mind: On the value of staging a debate
I always enjoy witnessing a good debate. And I mean the type of debate where one person is given a thesis to defend, while the other person speaks in favour of the anti-thesis. Sometimes – when smart people really get into it – seeing two debaters line up the arguments and create the strongest possible defence can really clarify the pros and cons in my mind and hence make me understand the issue better. For example – be it one in a written format – recently my good friend and colleague at the London Business School, Costas Markides, was asked by Business Week to debate the thesis that “happy workers will produce more and do their jobs better”. Harvard’s Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer had the (relatively easy) task of defending the “pro”. I say relatively easy, because the thesis seems intuitively appealing, it is what we’d all like to believe, and they have actually done ample research on the topic. My poor London Business School colleague was given the hapless task to defend the “co...