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"anticipatory obedience"

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorauseilender_Gehorsam

Sadly the article only exists in German because, well, the most well known example of it is how people acted under Hitler.

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This is, in fact, a very obvious and well known facet of management technique in the white collar world. Often, when faced with a hard or completely distasteful call, it's possible to structure your communication on a way that you never actually tell anyone to do the thing, but it gets done anyway.

It is a cornerstone that marks the difference between an exec who can and an exec who cannot CYA.

This is also why "Can I get that in writing", or asking something outright in an email is a fantastic way to corner a squirrely exec.

I see links to Japanese and Chinese too. Can't use them, though.

Anyway, https://www.deepl.com/translator works perfectly via cut&paste from .de to English for this.

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