This Element is an excerpt from Success Built to Last: Creating a Life that Matters (ISBN: 9780132287517) by Jerry Porras, Stewart Emery, and Mark Thompson. Available in print and digital formats. How to use carefully calibrated, constructive confrontation to ignite your team’s best, most passionate, most creative ideas. The best thing you can do about contention is throw fuel on the flames. You heard it right. Contention is something enduringly successful people actually seek out: gloves-off, brutally frank dialogue. These “naked conversations” are not intended to be personally abusive. The focus is on issues, not people....