In academia, it's open season on attacking ideas. There's nothing wrong with this; indeed, that's what we expect our intellectuals to do. Unfortunately, some ca

In academia, it's open season on attacking ideas. There's nothing wrong with this; indeed, that's what we expect our intellectuals to do. Unfortunately, some cannot separate (both as critics, and when criticized) the attacking of ideas from attacking of people. In corporate, it's always an attack on a person, because ideas don't matter in corporate. In theory, ideas can matter insofar as they can drive a P&L, but in practice, corporate is not about P&L at all so much as it is about how P&L are attributed to oneself personally. This does mean people are less ready to criticize an idea (or a person) in the open, although that's mostly because the real gaming happens behind the backs of those being gamed.