“Denying that you said something, when you did, is a sin as old as management itself; it is a core function of being a boss. Lots of leadership styles rely on projecting a level of certainty and commitment which really isn’t consistent with the tendency of the world to change.
I don’t think anyone necessarily paid attention to the possible consequence of making this kind of normal management behaviour so much more difficult, when we moved to a world of largely text-based communication”