Never argue with your boss (2009)

Sometimes it's the plane that collapses:

“The Korean culture has two features—respect for seniority and age, and quite an authoritarian style,” said Thomas Kochan, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You put those two together, and you may get more one-way communication—and not a lot of it upward,” Kochan said. The Asiana pilots on Flight 214 apparently did not discuss their predicament, the Los Angeles Times reported, citing cockpit voice recordings. As a general point of reference about the Korean language, you speak to superiors and elders in an honorific form that requires more words and can be more oblique. Less, “Yo! You want water?”; and more, “It’s a warm day for a nice refreshment, no?” This may sound trivial. But put this in the context of a cockpit, where seconds and decision-making are crucial and you get an idea of how communication and culture matter."

"Nearing the end of the 1990s, Korean Air had more plane crashes than almost any other airline around the globe. Cockpit miscommunication has been a persistent factor in these accidents. For example, the Korean Air Flight 801 crash was attributed to the pilot’s decision to land despite the junior officer’s disagreement, evidence of high power distance — a culture that denotes a heavily hierarchical society. Gladwell argues that this innate behavior of deep reverence towards elders and superiors highly contributes to cockpit miscommunication, especially on planes designed to be flown by two equals. Unsurprisingly, it has been found that the safest airlines are often from countries whose cultures do not value strict hierarchies."

https://www.cnbc.com/2013/07/09/korean-culture-may-offer-clu...

https://leonogas.medium.com/thinking-beyond-cultural-legacy-...

There are things that managers are good at and things that their staff are good at. For technical roles, a manager doesn't need to be superior to their staff when it comes to technical decisions - in fact if they are, it implies a problem.

Once you start viewing work as a collaborative exercise, a lot of these problems disappear.

But sure, ultimately your role is to provide your opinion as an expert, but you should step aside if your manager decides otherwise after hearing you. I think it's also correct: you are responsible for the decisions you make (which is true for you and your manager too).

So I think the author should have softened the discussion rather than going for a full confrontation. The boss surely didn't react rationally, or didn't surface their reasoning properly.

But being able to argue with your superiors (and peers) "the right way" is one of the most important skills to have in the workplace imo.

In reality, if you take extreme assumptions about most situations, counterexamples are bound to appear. But the cases we usually talk about tend to be about 'boundary issues'. things that happen near a certain line.

Your example is actually a typical pathology of East Asian culture. The ideal is what I described, but when it doesn't work ideally, it leads to uncritical acceptance of a superior's orders

If you take extreme examples for any situation, there are many difficult points. Conversely, we can't say that extreme cases never occur. So it's more accurate to say that I'm speaking based on cases that fall within the general distribution.

You brought up a counterexample to my point, but that's actually a problem that frequently materializes in East Asian societies. I have no intention of denying that. But what I'm describing is the ideal theory.

As always, finding the balance is the difficult part.