I'm a guy with 40 years of experience, and I'm working with a 20 year old. I learned a technique awhile back and a strategy that is-- whoever has to implement

I'm a guy with 40 years of experience, and I'm working with a 20 year old. I learned a technique awhile back and a strategy that is-- whoever has to implement it gets to make a lot of decisions. So I give advice and suggestions and he does his thing and more than once he comes back and says "You were right". Never gloat, this is how you guide people-- because you can't micromanage programmers, you can give them suggestions or even directions or ideas, but you can't control them. This is the sense I got from Steve Jobs as well- he was passionate and he would say things definitively, but he understood collaboration. He was persuadable. I am persuadable, my biggest lament though is that so few people try. So many people just demand that things be done a certain way- and often with the worst excuse "that's how other companies do it" (or "that's standard practice" or even "best practices" -- which is just saying "I belong to a cargo cult.") That attitude is death to a startup.