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'He tells us: "Eventually somebody would come back to you with your idea – they would say, 'Hey, you know, this doesn't need Windows at all'. And you have to co
by grababner 6y ago
'He tells us: "Eventually somebody would come back to you with your idea – they would say, 'Hey, you know, this doesn't need Windows at all'. And you have to control your urge to fucking kill them, because you've been telling them that for two years and now they finally come up with it like it's their idea. But that's the Jedi mind trick." '
OMG. I learned this a few years ago working in a corp environment with stubborn senior people with big egos. Basically, to get one of these types on board with your idea you have to find a way to convince them the idea was originally theirs. Sounds strange I know..
- siculars 6y agoThis is the way. L+1 thinking.
- hyperion2010 6y agoBenjamin Franklin.
- sneak 6y ago> to get one of these types on board with your idea you have to find a way to convince them the idea was originally theirs I forget where I read it, but I recall reading several times that this was how people at Apple had to present stuff to Steve Jobs to get him onboard with it. He'd initially dismiss it, then come back with the exact same idea as if it were his own. EDIT: According to this URL, it was from the Isaacson biography: https://www.nhbr.com/emulate-steve-jobs-with-your-eyes-open/ https://www.nhbr.com/emulate-steve-jobs-with-your-eyes-open/
- unishark 6y agoThat's what set Steve Jobs apart. Your typical executive could take months between rejecting your idea and proposing it as their own. But Jobs could compress this down to a week.
- oblio 6y agoI'm amazed how absolutely every character flaw Jobs had gets turned into a positive. If I had a nickel for how many times I've seen this happen on the internet, I'd be rich.
- olivermarks 6y agoI also don't think clever monopolistic businessman Gates would ever be 'hoodwinked'
- avalys 6y agoThat's because "character flaws" on a personal level are often required to achieve exceptional results. Not sufficient. But often required. If Jobs were a quiet, contemplative, respectful person who was careful to keep track of where he heard what idea and assign credit where credit was due - it's unlikely we'd have Apple. That's just a different personality type.
- watwut 6y agoWhy putting character flaws into quotes? They are still character flaws, the same way as same behavior is if it is not coming from rich powergul person. There is no reason to pretend it is something special. If they helped him to get more money and more credit and what not, that does not make them not flaws.
- fenderbluesjr 6y agoCalling them flaws would seem to me to be a subjective position. Personality traits are perceived differently depending on what the observer is sensitive to. Somebody that is considered rude in a yoga clinic might not be perceived the same way on a construction site.
- paulryanrogers 6y agoIs there any culture in which claiming credit for the ideas and innovations of others is considered positive? And how many would agree it's healthy?
- vishnugupta 6y ago> Basically, to get one of these types on board with your idea you have to find a way to convince them the idea was originally theirs. Central plot of the movie Inception ;-)
- naikrovek 6y ago> Sounds strange I know. There is nothing strange about that, unfortunately. It's just how people work. Things like this are also why I sincerely hope that humanity eventually dies off and is replaced by literally any species, natural or artificial, that bases decisions on logic and facts. There is no such thing as a meritocracy when humans are involved, no matter how much we delude ourselves to believe otherwise.
- volgar1x 6y agoIt is time to take some vacations pal.
- naikrovek 6y agoThanks for the advice that wasn't requested and isn't appreciated. Also, we aren't pals.
- simonh 6y agoThe problem with that is logic doesn’t provide goals, priorities or motivation to achieve them. I was thinking about this recently while watching Raised By Wolves. The Androids express feelings and emotions, but this isn’t necessarily unrealistic. That could be a useful way to encode goals and evaluate priorities.
- naikrovek 6y agoI didn't describe my logic, so to which logic are you referring? I made some statements which I believe to be true. You're just contributing to my beliefs that humanity is entirely worthless.
- simonh 6y agoI'm sorry you took offense, I didn't mean to be rude. I'm just making a point about logic in general, not "your logic" whatever you mean by that. Fundamental drives and goals are necessarily axiomatic and so cannot be derived logically. Intermediate goals yes, but not base drives and objectives.
- irrational 6y agoHave you seen the movie “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”? What you are describing is a big plot point in the movie.
- jmkd 6y agoThe art of diplomacy is to let other people have your way
- zeristor 6y agoPerhaps this had been done to you in turn...
- saurik 6y agoIf your goal is to change the world--incepting some politician to change their position or some businessperson to alter their product--that makes a lot of sense... if you are working for some company extracting value from you, why would you ever do this? I can't imagine it would help your career any... shouldn't you be spending all of that effort finding a less toxic place to work?
- TheRealSteel 6y agoI agree. I imagine the idea is you do it when you'll still get to lead/work on the project and it'll be enjoyable/beneficial to your career.
- tooltower 6y agoI tend to think of bureaucracies as a mechanism for outsourcing the "real-life" parts of a project I care less about. The marketing, the litigation-responding, the budgeting. The cost is you sometimes have to deal with this. Sometimes it's still worth it. Whether or not it's toxic depends on whether or not you wanted them to take credit for it, or whether it was a surprise. Not every "idea" that crosses one's mind is worth taking credit for. They are not that great to begin with.
- kortilla 6y ago> if you are working for some company extracting value from you, why would you ever do this? Because there can be massive monetary rewards for it? (Sorry if that’s the obvious answer we’re all pretending isn’t there.) We’re talking about the Xbox project, where one of the leaders is so rich he pays people to help him cook ancient Egyptian bread for something to do.
- saurik 6y agoOk, so if you are incepting someone into giving you a pay raise or a dividend or options or a commission on a new project, that makes some sense to me; but if you are just working at a company and have to move mountains to convince people to do something that they will never even be able to appreciate you for it because part of the process was tricking them into thinking it was their own idea, then I guess I am saying you also need to make damned sure that you aren't going to just work for that project and have protection against being replaced on it: you need to incept the further idea that you should get a cut of the upside (which just sounds difficult in a world where you are explicitly diverting any credit for the idea to someone else).
- koonsolo 6y agoI've seen this in companies too. You keep reminding them about this thing, and then eventually they come up with this idea themselves. I have the feeling that the idea doesn't reach their mind but their subconscious, and then that one reminds their mind again. It seems they have to ponder on it for a while, maybe hear it multiple times, before it reaches their mind again as their own idea. It makes you wonder how many of your own ideas were actually that from others.
- captainbland 6y agoFrustratingly high in my case, apparently. The good news is that Google often allows you to easily verify that fact. The bad news is that Google often allows you to easily verify that fact.
- jbj 6y agoThat was alledgedly how the Technical University of Denmark was started by Hans Christian Ørsted after he praised government officials of "their" idea of a polytechnical learning institution.
- nashashmi 6y agoImagine the same trick being used with Trump: “it was your idea to wear face masks”.
- dwd 6y agoI once worked at a place where I would constantly suggest switching to GoLang to solve some performance scaling issues. I recently got a call from a recruiter asking me if I was interested in a job programming in Go...
- kortilla 6y agoGo doesn’t solve scaling issues in any meaningful sense. At most it’s just some constant factor reduction in required severs compared to python/ruby/whatever interpreted thing it usually replaces.
- seer 6y agoThe way I see it, you are just a single data point to the senior people. You mention something, they hear it from a couple of other places and they are now convinced that its a good path forward. You can put your black hat and game this by making sure you suggest whatever you’re after to more people/sources of info that your target listens to. Bonus points for going through intermediaries that obscure the source of the idea. At some point, your senior decision maker has his “epiphany” as what you want is “what everybody is talking about”. Interestingly this is something we talk about with my partner as a lot of times one of us would suggest something, the other might be dismissive, but then someone else would suggest, it gets done and and I/she would get upset that “you listen to them but not to me”. But in reality whats going on is that we are both waiting to accumulate enough data points to make a heuristic work. Once that became apparent we’re much more understanding to each other. As for managers, if they smart enough, they would notice that a lot of the things you’re suggesting ends up what being done, and at some point they would value your points a lot more. But hardly anyone would use only one source of input to make their decisions.
- milliondollar 6y ago..and you've just described what management consultants do at scale.
- koheripbal 6y agoI think it can be as simple as... "I was thinking about what you said, and you were totally right, if we <insert your idea> then we can achieve <insert their goal>. I'm really glad you said that - you really gave me a new perspective on this."
- tvanantwerp 6y agoI've had that exact same experience with my wife. I'd tell her something for weeks, months, years, without her buying into it at all--then I'd watch somebody at a party tell her the same thing and she suddenly agrees! It's been infuriating. But now that I look at it in this framework, I have a path forward: spread ideas to her family and friends first.
- dagmx 6y ago
- liotier 6y ago> in a corp environment with stubborn senior people with big egos. Basically, to get one of these types on board with your idea you have to find a way to convince them the idea was originally theirs. Sounds strange I know.. Not strange at all: that is the way my mother has always operated with my father.
- dude_bro 6y agoThat's basically the core of managing without authority. If you want people to do something but they don't report to you, then it has to seem like a great idea that will benefit them. All the better if they think it was originally their idea and get to claim the credit.
- lucideer 6y ago> I learned this a few years ago working in a corp environment with stubborn senior people with big egos. Not disagreeing that corp envs are full of senior people with big egos, but this looks a little different from the opposite perspective. Imagine you're a hypothetical "ideal" egoless senior corp person, and you have 20 people coming to you with their ideas. You know >51% of them are likely bad ideas (or at least it would be a bad idea to adopt most of them simultaneously). How can you tell which are worth adopting? If you trusted any of the suggesters absolutely they probably would've been promoted already, so it's difficult; you "stubbornly" reject most of them (probably some of the good ones too), or at the very least put them on the long finger for consideration later. When you do get on board with an idea, yes there is still the problem of proper attribution and credit, and often there's non-benign human factors involved in muddying the waters there. But often ideas are Venn diagrams and defining them as atomic things from a single source isn't really practical.
- ficklepickle 6y agoFound the manager