Conflict: something we can all agree on

During a rare candid moment, someone once told me his approach to business was (1) make lots of money, and (2) don't get bogged down in consensus-building. As much as I appreciated his honesty, I didn't realize just how newsworthy his perspective would be. Flip through a stack of recent business magazines and you will see

• "Productive Friction: How Difficult Business Partnerships Can Accelerate Innovation," by John Hagel III and John Seely Brown, in the February 2005 Harvard Business Review.
• "Want Collaboration? Accept--and Actively Manage--Conflict," by Jeff Weiss and Jonathan Hughes, in the March 2005 HBR.
• "How Acquisitions [and the resulting conflicts] Can Revitalize Companies," by Freek Vermeulen, in the Summer 2005 MIT Sloan Management Review.

I'm glad we're all agreed on that! As a worthy appendix to this slew of confrontation-mongering, add "Your Alliances Are Too Stable," by David Ernst and James Bamford, in the June 2005 HBR.

I'd like to be clear that I do like these headlines, and even some of the articles. I mention them here both because networks are so relevant to mergers and acquisitions, and because networks are popularly (and erroneously) viewed as synonymous with harmonious collaboration. Anyway, the intense feeling of business strategy deja vu reminds me of The Onion's version of what would happen if Cosmopolitan published a compendium: "812,683 ways to please your man."