Big companies get a bad rap. We think of them as creativity-killing machines that constantly crush the world-changing ideas of their hardworking employees. As if such internal mechanisms don’t also save us from countless bad ideas, creative darlings, and disasters-in-the-making. In fact, in my business experience, it’s nearly too scary to contemplate how many horrible ideas almost make it out the front door.

And they would have were it not for some lone dissenter who turned the tide.

Last year, anthropologist Grant McCracken proposed the idea of a C-level executive to track trends and monitor the “deep waves of culture in America and the world” in his influential book, Chief Culture Officer. A CCO is guru of cool and new to make sure the company doesn’t fall behind. This is important, but today I think companies desperately need this and more: an internal gatekeeper against bad ideas. A Chief Dissent Officer.

As we enter a high-speed, digital-driven economy, companies are under increased pressure to roll out more and more new things, to do it faster, with tighter development cycles. Online, especially with social media, we think publish first, think second. Companies that are unable to encourage dissent, who lack employees with the authority to say “Hey, let me stop and think about that” will find themselves making embarrassing blunders. Or worse.

“I guess I’d hoped that the CCO would be the CDO especially when the corporation was about to do something that was tone deaf with regard to culture, out of kilter with the moment,” McCracken explained to me over email. “But it could be that the CCO becomes the champion of good ideas and the CDO becomes the enemy of bad ones, the Yeah sayer and the Nay sayer, a kind of strategic tag team. Whether they wear those Mexican wrestler masks is of course entirely up to them.”

Like Gmail creator Paul Buchheit’s infamous killing of bad ideas at Google by saying “Don’t be evil,” it’s a great example of dissent not only staving off a possible disaster, but the power that a dissenter can gain from doing so. Buchheit’s maxim went on to be used as Google’s official motto, and his prominence raised along with it. When I spoke with Buchheit at a Y Combinator demo a few years ago, I got the sense that he inhabits the same role at the fund–a sort of resident contrarian who could often be an influential swing vote in deciding who and who not to invest in.

It turns out successful companies have been doing this for quite some time. Harvard Business School professor Bill George explained it as follows in a 2007 case study for the Harvard Business Review.