This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week. OpenAI fired its chief executive, Sam Altman, on Friday, accusing him of “not being consistently candid” with its board of directors. This kicked off several days of utter nonsense that astonished the tech world—and probably delighted a bunch of business-school types who now have a great example of why the incredibly boring-sounding term corporate governance is actually extremely important. Friday: The hour before everything went sideways, OpenAI’s board of directors consisted of just six people, including Altman. Its president, Greg Brockman, apparently took Altman’s side, while the other four members—the chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and three nonemployee members—voted to ether their CEO. Soon after, Brockman quit the company. Sunday: OpenAI invited Altman back to the office to discuss the prospect of rehiring him as CEO. Despite pressure from Microsoft, however, the board members declined to rehire Altman. Instead, they announced that the next chief executive …