Successful boards require what Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at the Yale School of Management, calls "a culture of open dissent," where members are free to criticize the C.E.O. and each other, and where there is no artificial attempt to impose consensus on the group.
To this end, define x(i) as agent i's local copy of x and impose consensus constraints x(i =x j for all pairs of neighbors i and j.
It's lucky there are limits to how far the individual imagination can be imposed on consensus reality.
So far, the Democrats have been hampered by the lack of an all-powerful figure like Mr. D'Amato, who can impose a consensus on the party.
Without either a federal power center or an imminent Presidential election — without a President, a Speaker of the House, a Senate Majority Leader, or a Presidential nominee — no institutional instrument or leader has the clout to impose a consensus.
Without either a federal power center or an imminent Presidential election without a President, a Speaker of the House, a Senate Majority Leader, or a Presidential nominee no institutional instrument or leader has the clout to impose a consensus.
Now, the executive and parliament are ranged against the judiciary and the country's un-elected institutions and Khomeini's successor, the conservative-leaning Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, seems unable to impose a consensus.
If national schisms over abortion and gay marriage teach us anything, it's that there isn't always a moral answer, and the law is often at its worst when attempting to divine or impose moral consensus, as opposed to interpreting black-letter law.
Of course, given that EU sanctions are developed and imposed on a consensus basis, it is right to note that outside the European Union, the United Kingdom will enjoy greater freedom to design sanctions independently of the views of EU members.
They see them as dominated by the United States, and as having imposed the "Washington consensus" of macroeconomic stability at the expense of other priorities.It is that sentiment that Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's leftist president, is trying to tap with his plan for a Banco del Sur (Bank of the South), a development bank funded and run by Latin American countries themselves.
