So in this article, George Packer asks Richard Holbrooke to describe how he runs his office:

Holbrooke described his method to me as “a form of democratic centralism, where you want open airing of views and opinions and suggestions upward, but once the policy’s decided you want rigorous, disciplined implementation of it. And very often in the government the exact opposite happens. People sit in a room, they don’t air their real differences, a false and sloppy consensus papers over those underlying differences, and they go back to their offices and continue to work at cross-purposes, even actively undermining each other.

It’s the second part that sounds so familiar to me; it’s as if he sat in on most “leadership team” meetings in schools or really in any educational bureaucracy. Replace “government” with “Local High School X” and his description is right on target.