>Academia is curious in that performance, both relative and cardinal, is evaluated explicitly and sometimes publicly; you develop a reputation quickly, and maki

>Academia is curious in that performance, both relative and cardinal, is evaluated explicitly and sometimes publicly; you develop a reputation quickly, and making errors especially in a classroom or seminar setting can be humiliating. Academics for their part tend to lean into this by playing the “let’s see how quickly I can destroy this entire presentation” game. This actually just hit me because it highlighted something my (new) boss does that completely caught me by surprise. He goes away and does research on an idea and comes to an extremely strong opinion about something, and only then will he discuss it with you, and I think that is highly related to this (his background is academia). In some ways this is great, he'll present things he's really thought about, but the flipside of it is that he wants absolutely no discussion. It's always communicated as "I've looked into this and decided x" and the result is that there's no real interrogation of the idea. And since the area we subject area we work in is new to him, it often means there are things he just doesn't have the experience or intuition to reason about. This has resulted in several situations where the team has had to do enormous amounts of work based on questionable assumptions that later turn out to not hold up to scrutiny. In every other team I've worked in people present their ideas without ego, are open to discussion and feedback and value the different perspectives. It takes a lot of effort to find ways to influence him and highlight issues, you kind of have to create a situation where you're making sure you're giving him feedback and thoughts about ideas before he has stated an opinion.