Time & Perspective Quote by Alfred P. Sloan

Consensus is comforting in the way a perfectly silent room is comforting: it suggests control, but it also suggests everyone is waiting for someone else to speak. Sloan’s line is a deadpan grenade lobbed into the self-congratulatory culture of “alignment.” On the surface, it’s procedural humor - postpone the vote, come back later. Underneath, it’s a ruthless diagnosis of how organizations manufacture bad decisions: not through malice, but through premature harmony.

The wit lands because he reverses the usual goal of meetings. Most leaders chase agreement as proof of competence. Sloan treats agreement as a warning light, implying either the problem has been framed too narrowly, dissent has been socially taxed, or key facts haven’t been surfaced. “Develop disagreement” sounds perverse until you realize it’s a strategy for forcing the hidden costs onto the table: who loses, what assumptions are being smuggled in, which risks are being politely ignored.

Context matters. Sloan ran General Motors in an era when scale made mistakes catastrophic and when corporate hierarchies could easily confuse deference with truth. His subtext is managerial, not philosophical: if smart people converge too quickly, you’re probably not using them. The joke also protects the move; by making dissent funny, he makes it safe. It’s a leader’s way of institutionalizing conflict without turning it into personal combat - postponement as a pressure valve, skepticism as a competency.

In an age that worships “moving fast,” Sloan is insisting on something more expensive: earning the decision.