Every company needs a designated hater
Someone who rips bad ideas before they escape into the wild.
When Roman generals paraded through the streets after a victory, someone walked behind them whispering
“Respice post te. Hominem te esse memento. Memento mori.”
meaning
“Look behind you. Remember you are a man. Remember you will die”
2,000 years ago they already understood that success makes people stupid.
We’ve had all that time. Most companies still haven’t worked it out.
In 1628, Sweden launched the most expensive warship ever built. The Vasa. It sank in 20 minutes. Too many cannons, too tall, and every single person involved in the build knew the design was unstable. Nobody told the king.
Nearly four hundred years later, McDonald’s CEO shot a video about the Big Arch that was so bad it felt like a parody. Sam Altman took a public jab at Anthropic that made him look rattled, not confident.
In both cases, someone in the building knew. They just didn’t say anything.
This is possibly the oldest problem in management.
And we keep trying to fix it with the wrong thing. More process. More approvals. More committees. None of that works because the problem was never process. The problem is that telling your boss their idea is bad feels like a career decision.
Most companies die from the inside out. From bad judgment disguised as creativity. From the “clever” ad nobody asked for. From the rebrand that made customers wonder if you’d lost the plot. Not from competitors. Not from the market. From the room going quiet when it shouldn’t have.
I’ve been in rooms like that and the pattern is always the same. The boss talks. Everyone nods because disagreeing doesn’t feel like an option.
That’s how dumb ideas survive long enough to go live.
Sometimes it’s not even fear.
You’ve spent three weeks on something. You hate it now, but killing it means admitting you were wrong. So you push it out anyway and hope nobody notices. Or it’s just conformity. You don’t want to be the difficult one. So you smile, pretend to like it, hit publish, and watch something you knew was bad land in front of customers.
Most of what gets called “shipping fast” is actually just nobody having the guts to kill something slow.
The higher you climb as a founder, the less truth you hear. And most companies have no structural fix for that.
You end up trapped in your own certainty, mistaking polite nods for consensus.
In 1970, Avis CEO Robert Townsend proposed a simple idea.
Hire someone whose entire job is to tell the CEO what is actually broken. Not a committee. A person.
He was half joking. He was also completely right.
Every company needs what I’d call a designated hater.
One person with explicit permission to say “this is bad, please stop” before it ships.
Not a “brand guardian” with a 100 slide deck. One person who says what the room is thinking and then goes back to sipping their flat white.
I’ve worked in companies that had this person, whether the title existed or not. The ones where they left or got managed out shipped noticeably worse work within a few months.
The person who says “wait, prove it” before you waste 3 months on something nobody wanted.
People love talking about psychological safety. Usually what they mean is everyone being nice to each other. That’s comfort. Actual safety is knowing you can say “this doesn’t work” without it showing up in your performance review.
Every founder or CEO thinks they want honesty until they get it.
People assume the person who says no kills morale.
I’ve watched the opposite happen.
Watching something stupid go live when everyone in the room knew it was stupid, and knowing you could have stopped it. That’s what actually kills morale.
The Romans gave someone the job of saying “you’re not as good as you think.”
Most companies still haven’t.
This week’s track is Fashion by David Bowie.
Love how you reframed ‘negativity’ as protection. It’s about care, not cynicism!
I write about surviving the corporate jungle using animal archetype to break down complex human behaviors and situations. If this resonates, please connect and lets support each other.
Here is my latest post:
https://corporatejungle.substack.com/p/ambition-vs-survival-mode-slow-down
Spot on. I use premortems for the same reason. I find they give people explicit permission to point out the problems before they happen. It shifts the conversation from defending ideas to strengthening them. When you make it safe to call out risks early, you trade surface alignment for real alignment. It’s one of the simplest ways to turn potential landmines into learning moments and ultimately make execution smoother and faster.