Organizational Behavior/Pop Psychology/Business Management/etc books

[Celery Man 20931]

We have another thread for business related non fiction. In this thread, I'm interested in hearing about the types of books that become de rigueur for business dipshits. Shit like anything Malcolm Gladwell, the book version of that viral Ted Talk your boss made you watch, or more personally focused stuff following in the tradition of How to Win Friends and Influence People (or 7 Habits), or even more field specific stuff (non profits, tech, what have you).

I often want to give myself a wedgie for reading or listening to this stuff, and in some cases I feel it's a slightly more overblown version of scientific studies turning into chyrons reading "'Drink more red wine' say doctors in new study'". But, I also find it useful to be current or ahead of the curve on what ideas or language is floating around. And in the same way that sitting in church and thinking about being a better person can help you be a better person even if you don't agree with the sermon or the institution itself, I like to marinate my brain in this stuff sometimes. And sometimes there are good ideas worth exploring or ruminating on.

I've been meaning to work through my list of these I've been meaning to read or have half read, and have started making more progress by listening to audiobooks from the library while doing chores every night. In the past few months I've listened to

Dare to Lead
Never Split the DIfference
Start With Why
Measure What Matters

all had at least interesting parts. I'm in to structured goal setting and have used OKRs with some success previously, and so I did enjoy the deep dive and example stories in Measure What Matters. Even if the pizza company (Zune Pizza) was a stupid fucking idea from conception and Google's Youtube OKRs had extremely negative side effects that they didn't discuss. It was interesting having the subjects read their chapters as well, including Bill Gates and Bono.

Start With Why is getting a little dated and I think is hurt by... so much of what is in this book has become just baked into corporate culture. Still at least interesting and I'm glad to have finally gotten through it since it is so widely read. I think Slorch started a thread a while ago bitching about his boss wanting him to read it or something else Simon Sinek wrote, so it's officially everywhere. I'm actually going to apply a little bit of this and a little bit of Measure What Matters with my team as we do our next bout of quarterly planning and try and head off some discussions that keep popping up in the next rung of leadership about why our team belongs where it is rather than as part of a different functional org, which would be fucking stupid because our purpose is entirely different than theirs.

Dare to Lead - I'm trying to decide if I'm a little sexist about this one. I feel like I'll go through some more Brene Brown to just marinate on that a bit. Mostly I just can't see myself ever using the... language toolbox she builds in this book. But per my wife, everyone in non profits talks about her constantly, and that makes all the sense in the world. Still - the core idea I think is good (it is brave to be vulnerable, the "armor" we put on encumbers us and harms our ability to achieve our goals, here is how to approach creating space for vulnerability in organizations, or something like that). I also enjoyed her anecdote about blowing up at her husband who was pissed off at the lack of lunch meat in the fridge. Have been there.

Never Split the Difference was great and one that I may go buy in dead tree or at least listen to again. This is more specifically about how to negotiate, written by an ex FBI hostage negotiator who has built a company applying those methods to business. I am not a sales guy, this is not an area where I am strong, I have been trying to actively think about using these methods on a daily basis as I can see them being effective. Honestly sometimes now I mirror my wife and it works extremely well. This was also a pretty enjoyable listen/read, I thought.

I'm starting "Originals" right now - I have Adam Grant's new book "Think Again" on my physical shelf and have read 80 pages but I think I'm just going to start over whenever a copy frees up on Libby. "Radical Candor" is another one I started on a plane ride forever ago and have meant to finish - just familiarity with the concept of that one was useful when it was very popular a few years back.

Ones that I feel like I need to read - Lean Startup, Good to Great, Leaders Eat Last.

I actually haven't read any of the Malcolm Gladwell books. I suppose I should.

Any books in this general category y'all have found particularly useful or thought provoking?

[Prepuce of Doom 21052]

More psychology than business strategy so perhaps not quite what you're after, but I recommend that you skip Gladwell and read anything by Daniel Kahneman or Gerd Gigerenzer instead. 

[Hank Scorpio 17729]

I don’t think I’ve had the urge to bully someone in 20 years, but this thread did it. God damn fucking nerds. 

[Celery Man 20931]

40 minutes ago, Prepuce of Doom said:

More psychology than business strategy so perhaps not quite what you're after, but I recommend that you skip Gladwell and read anything by Daniel Kahneman or Gerd Gigerenzer instead. 

Thinking Fast and Slow is on my radar - I was trying to think of where I had seen Kahneman’s name. I’ll check it out.

i have a feeling that Gladwell is seen as being… very much stretching a little bit of science a long way in his writing, but I’m not sure where I got that impression from. Is that part of why you recommend skipping, or just that these other guys have written better stuff in that area?

[Prepuce of Doom 21052]

Gladwell is pretty far up his own ass in my opinion. He's the Reader's Digest version of who he thinks he is. 

[Vegas64 673]

Agree with opinions on Gladwell as a lot of his stuff has been debunked (e.g. 10,000 hour rule), but it's definitely interesting if not sophomoric. I recommend college kids read him because it's a good introduction into behavioral/social science and pop psychology. 

We have a book club at work that focuses on this genre, so I'm at least familiar by name of a lot of the trendy books and authors, but also find them to be dubious in value.

Personally I like Daniel Pink (Drive) and David Epstein (Range). In fact, I think I prefer Epstein's email newsletter better than his books, which I have often quoted in topics on other boards.

[Celery Man 20931]

On 7/19/2022 at 12:34 AM, Vegas64 said:

We have a book club at work that focuses on this genre, so I'm at least familiar by name of a lot of the trendy books and authors, but also find them to be dubious in value.

Yeah it's fairly clear that a lot of the time it's... 

1) have an idea that is simple but feels newish and is compelling to leadership types (whether it's a good one or not)

2) write enough words for it to be a book and therefore platform for your speaking/workshop career

3) profit

with the wrinkle that sometimes the book exists as a way to sell the Ted talk.

I think there can still be a value in that if the idea is decent and like me you grasp things through overexposure. And there's the value of being familiar with the trendy concepts, and having lots of examples and elt friendly ways to package the thing you want to do that you need them to bless.

Anyways - thanks for mentioning those two - they're on the list alongside Kahneman.

Edited July 22, 2022 by Celery Man

[Celery Man 20931]

On 7/12/2022 at 9:20 PM, Celery Man said:

Ones that I feel like I need to read - Lean Startup, Good to Great, Leaders Eat Last.

 

50% through Good to Great and I hate this book so much

[Prepuce of Doom 21052]

To be filed in the "Why Malcolm Gladwell is an Insufferable Poobutt" folder. 

 

Edited August 7, 2022 by Prepuce of Doom

[Celery Man 20931]

49 minutes ago, Prepuce of Doom said:

To be filed in the "Why Malcolm Gladwell is an Insufferable Poobutt" folder. 

 

The double whammy of “people working from home are sitting in their pajamas 24/7” and “1. Come into office 2. ??? 3. Connected workforce 4. Profit”

someone needs to write the book for c suite assholes on how to adapt to the new remote flex reality. “Connecting Apart” “Remotely Together” “Universal Remote” “Distributed Culture” 

 

just finished both Originals and Think Again (both by Adam Grant). Some good food for thought in both. Definitely need to work out my … challenging held beliefs muscles.

Edited August 7, 2022 by Celery Man

[Prepuce of Doom 21052]

The dunking currently happening on Twitter is not to be missed. 

 

[Celery Man 20931]

About 70% of the way through Thinking Fast and Slow, am either going to have to pick up the dead tree version that I realized we actually own (wife had to read it for a course at UT) or go back to the end of the line for the audiobook from the library. But yeah, this is great - I'm going to have to read The Undoing Project. I'm glad I got through a big chunk of this in close connection with having read "Good to Great", as Kahneman addresses Jim Collins (I think his other book, Built to Last) and validated/better stated a lot of the reasons why I hated that stupid fucking book. I can't believe it's as much of a classic as it is.

Big thanks for the point in the direction of Kahneman, @Prepuce of Doom. A goal of diving into books of this broad category was to be familiar with a large portion of the ideas (whether I found them useful or not), but of course another was to learn interesting things, improve habits and skills, and better understand people and organizations. Fast and Slow is right on the money for that, and I almost feel the need to balance it with some opposing viewpoints just because it feels so convincing and "of course". The system 1/system 2 dichotomy and what that means for our behavior/choices/rationality is so interesting and makes so much sense.

[Prepuce of Doom 21052]

1 hour ago, Celery Man said:

About 70% of the way through Thinking Fast and Slow, am either going to have to pick up the dead tree version that I realized we actually own (wife had to read it for a course at UT) or go back to the end of the line for the audiobook from the library. But yeah, this is great - I'm going to have to read The Undoing Project. I'm glad I got through a big chunk of this in close connection with having read "Good to Great", as Kahneman addresses Jim Collins (I think his other book, Built to Last) and validated/better stated a lot of the reasons why I hated that stupid fucking book. I can't believe it's as much of a classic as it is.

Big thanks for the point in the direction of Kahneman, @Prepuce of Doom. A goal of diving into books of this broad category was to be familiar with a large portion of the ideas (whether I found them useful or not), but of course another was to learn interesting things, improve habits and skills, and better understand people and organizations. Fast and Slow is right on the money for that, and I almost feel the need to balance it with some opposing viewpoints just because it feels so convincing and "of course". The system 1/system 2 dichotomy and what that means for our behavior/choices/rationality is so interesting and makes so much sense.

The overall core concept of the "system 1/system 2" is broadly referred to as the dual-process theory in psychology, and while it's been taken in a lot of different directions, it's pretty widely acknowledged/accepted. 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_process_theory

[Celery Man 20931]

Finished The Undoing Project. What a great book. Thanks @BearSchlong for the additional nudge to read that. That and Thinking Fast and Slow are my favorite books I’ve read in a number of years. 

[morehornsepower 887]

Just finished "Turn the Ship Around" (David Marquet).  Fairly quick read, but a great take on how to build an empowered team.

[Guest]

It's been my experience that the folks who overly  tout these books are in waaaaay the fuck over their heads when it comes to leading people.  There's nothing wrong with self-improvement, and we should never stop learning, but to borrow a line from Will Hunting, " You people baffle me. You spend all this money on beautiful, fancy books--and they're the wrong fuckin' books."  

Example: Because of Covid, I had never been to my boss' office in her 2 year tenure.  In July, we did our mid-year reviews in person and she had no fewer than 30 books on leadership and business on the shelf behind her desk. It might have been 50 or more, but I was laughing inside.  I am certain she read every one of them front to back.  Her lack of genuine buy-in and Stepford wife reactions to business situations/challenges made immediate sense.  She was relieved of her duties a couple of weeks ago because of how she tried to turn every process into an academic exercise.  Those books inhibited her ability to lead and react as she tried to turn everything into a scripted play.  Yeah, life ain't like that.  Neither is leadership.

Again, not knocking the books in general, but they can become an albatross around one's neck when it comes to application of the lessons contained therein.

 

Edited October 15, 2022 by slorch

[Celery Man 20931]

1 hour ago, morehornsepower said:

Just finished "Turn the Ship Around" (David Marquet).  Fairly quick read, but a great take on how to build an empowered team.

this was on my list - this is the navy guy who took a very poor performing ship and turned it into a high performing one by... enabling decision making by the people closest to the problem (or that's roughly the gist)?

47 minutes ago, slorch said:

It's been my experience that the folks who overly  tout these books are in waaaaay the fuck over their heads when it comes to leading people.  There's nothing wrong with self-improvement, and we should never stop learning, but to borrow a line from Will Hunting, " You people baffle me. You spend all this money on beautiful, fancy books--and they're the wrong fuckin' books."  

Example: Because of Covid, I had never been to my boss' office in her 2 year tenure.  In July, we did our mid-year reviews in person and she had no fewer than 30 books on leadership and business on the shelf behind her desk. It might have been 50 or more, but I was laughing inside.  I am certain she read every one of them front to back.  Her lack of genuine buy-in and Stepford wife reactions to business situations/challenges made immediate sense.  She was relieved of her duties a couple of weeks ago because of how she tried to turn every process into an academic exercise.  Those books inhibited her ability to lead and react as she tried to turn everything into a scripted play.  Yeah, life ain't like that.  Neither is leadership.

Again, not knocking the books in general, but they can become an albatross around one's neck when it comes to application of the lessons contained therein.

 

honestly, while I do get a lot of value from some of these book I completely agree. I would carve out Kahneman and Never Split the Difference but the primary utility I get and am attempting to get from reading all of this stuff is being fluent in it and being able to retrieve smart or at least current sounding things to say when talking to people who might decide that i need more money and responsibility. Actually I just missed the boat on.... "Inspired" and "Empowered" by Marty Kagan which I was asked about in the context of an interview. So I guess those just made the list.

but yeah - I think there are a lot of good lessons that can be found in a variety of places including books like this, and you can internalize those things and draw on them in the context of actually leading people. And there's some more practical stuff like Never Split the Difference or Measure What Matters where it talks about approaches to problems or interactions specifically. But (and I'm remembering you had thread complaining about Simon Sinek and I imagine this was the same boss) books like "Start With Why" for example - I do think that there is value to having alignment about purpose and mission at an elemental level up and down the organization but a lot of the practical value is in the shibboleth of seeming to understand and care about the same things as leadership. In situations requiring actual leadership, you can mull on these ideas and internalize the concepts but it's all about experience and temperament/character when you're in the thick of things. I guess applying Kahneman - it is very difficult to purposefully engage system 2 in situations where system 1 is in control. It's about training system 1.

 

 

Edited October 15, 2022 by Celery Man

[morehornsepower 887]

14 minutes ago, Celery Man said:

this was on my list - this is the navy guy who took a very poor performing ship and turned it into a high performing one by... enabling decision making by the people closest to the problem (or that's roughly the gist)?

That is roughly the gist, yup.

[Celery Man 20931]

The thing i love about that approach is that it works well when you're the dumbest person in the room and also I heavily internalized it by chronically rereading Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow as a teen.

[MeerkatBong 115]

For those starting new gigs, this is supposed to be good:

[Celery Man 20931]

About halfway through Noise by Kahneman. Central purpose of the book is that while we pay a lot of attention to bias (not meaning in the social sense) in our judgments, we neglect noise which has an equivalent impact on accuracy. I need to get a paper copy to sit down and go back through some of the stuff, but it is interesting in some new ways and also interesting in some ways I basically understood but didn't have enough source material to back up. Managed to win a recent dumb work argument that we should categorize things and then sort (instead of sort the whole thing), and that we should estimate things relative to one another rather than on a set scale. Loan behold, here's a chapter talking about the magic number 7 and the drastic noise reduction in comparative vs linear judgments. 

Edited January 19, 2023 by Celery Man

[Celery Man 20931]

 

I was trying to collect my thoughts on this one a bit closer to having read it, and regret that I failed to do so. Actually I may revisit this one when I can focus a bit more. Fairly quick listen, I think 5 or 6 hours, good and useful studies and rumination on regret, how it is a natural and useful emotion, how we should understand different types of regret, and what we should do with it. There was no big groundbreaking illumination for me here but it was a good lengthy sermon on a useful topic that leaves me with some thoughts on how I should revise my thoughts and actions. From the lens of a recovered alcoholic, there were also some interesting parts in "how do we deal with regret" that maybe shed some light on why a few parts of recovery work the way that they do.

I haven't listened to this but here's the author talking about the book to tech bros.

 

[HamsterHookah 112]

I love Dan Pink but I am a bit fatigued by him and didn't buy this one. Sounds like I didn't miss much, which was my first inclination. The pressure to churn out ground-breaking books is difficult once you have that first huge success.

[Sam Lin 3550]

On 10/15/2022 at 7:26 AM, Celery Man said:

Finished The Undoing Project. What a great book. Thanks @BearSchlong for the additional nudge to read that. That and Thinking Fast and Slow are my favorite books I’ve read in a number of years. 

Just finished both of these. (Thinking Fast and Slow first, and then The Undoing Project.)

I'd call The Undoing Project a teaser for Thinking Fast and Slow, it's much more about the individual life histories of Kahneman and Tversky, and the people around them, than about the theories they developed. It touches on the theories in basic, easy to understand examples. (Feels like 80% biography, 20% theories.) Much easier read, also 200pg shorter. And it's a genuinely entertaining and enjoyable read, lots of historical content about life in early Israel with constant war.

Thinking Fast and Slow is all about the theories, much more explanation of the theories as well as the formulas that are used to define the theories, and many more varied examples.

Analogy: if Thinking Fast and Slow is a movie, The Undoing Project is the trailer for that movie. Would recommend reading The Undoing Project first, it is the more "enjoyable/entertaining" read, and then continuing into Thinking Fast and Slow if the theories grab your curiosity.

 

As for the theories themselves, by now they are widely accepted as correct and as revolutionary; the Nobel prize doesn't come easy. It's real, useful food for thought. I hope to keep their lessons strong enough in my mind to question my own intuitions and decisionmaking at least part of the time.

[Celery Man 20931]

I need to go back and finish "Noise" (I checked it out from the library, two weeks was not long enough for me to get through 16 hours of book) by Kahneman. It seemed useful in a lot of the same ways that Thinking Fast and Slow is. Agree with your characterizations of Undoing and TF&S. TF&S is dense, definitely feels like an academic writing a version of his textbooks or scholarly work for laypeople. But the ideas are so interesting, useful, and thought provoking that it presents more of a problem in the amount you feel like you need to focus to capture what is being said vs being boring or incomprehensible or whatever. The Undoing Project is wonderful context, a great story, and a taste of the content (written by someone who is great at telling these kinds of stories).

 

Sidenote - whenever I think of "popular version of a textbook" I think of Coincidences, Chaos, and All That Math Jazz which is the popular version of Professor Starbird's "Heart of Mathematics" advanced math for liberal arts (plan ii) textbook. It is a light and fun read explaining things like degrees of infinity, how to conceptualize 4d/5d/etc space, fractals maybe, stuff like that.

 

One of my bosses posted a "here's the bullshit I read in 2022" thing last year and I've worked through a few of them - here is my review of "Essentialism" by Greg McKeown

A few categories of these kinds of books are.... the very academically slanted ones like Kahneman, or ones that (and maybe perform some of their own) research and academic work and then apply it very directly to business scenarios in the book (Pink, probably Grant). There are certainly other types of these books but a big category is "Here is my idea, I'm going to talk at length about it with case studies and give it a name and there will be a Ted Talk and I'm going to make money on consulting and speaking gigs" (Sinek, Brown, etc). That's not necessarily bad - Start With Why is maybe fucked out but it's a fine example, as is Radical Candor and Measure What Matters and any number of similar books that have useful content. I think what makes these kinds of books good/sticky is if

1. the idea is good/appealing/feels right
2. the idea is novel
3. the idea addresses a broad problem in a specific way
4. the book explains how to apply it and makes you want to try applying it

As an example: Radical Candor - a problem with how we communicate in business and our personal lives is that we avoid giving direct feedback and speaking openly about problems (because culture/feelings). This is inefficient and actually unkind, do these things to promote radical candor in your organization and experience outcomes like these people/organizations.  <- this all feels true and reading this book made me want to challenge myself to be more direct

It's a broad problem that applies in our personal lives as well as every kind of organization, it gives you an interesting and perhaps different way of looking at it, this one had the bonus of a nice illustration to communicate the concept, and I think it gives you some concrete steps/things to do while going in to however many case studies. And I'm sure Kim Scott makes a hefty chunk every year giving the same talk at conferences and retreats and what have you, she probably has an teams that will come do workshops, etc - all good and fine.

The big idea of "Essentialism" is to, instead of doing all of the things, do fewer things well. That's a big hit on item 1 (of course you should do that) but I don't think it hits on any of the other 4 things. I listened to two hours of him outlining an idea so obvious that it can't really be called an insight, and then just leaning hard into the part where he names the idea and sets up the speaking gigs. I can see him using a laser pointer to point at the big stylized essentialist on the screen and giving a knowing look to his audience. Somewhere in around hour 1 of this 6 hour audio book he started talking about the pareto principle - he had yet to say anything interesting up to that point and I decided it was unlikely he was saving the useful 20% for later in the book, so I gave it another little bit and then quit the book.

Caveat - I have a medium deep background in agile where saying no and throughput over bandwidth is a core concept. Maybe there is something useful here to people who haven't spent years internalizing that concept, although I bet there's better places to spend time with those ideas. Also, I think I have a pet peeve about the business thought content thing of "I'm going to name a concept and then just talk about this name I made up for fucking ever", or outlining a stupid analogy and then just fucking the analogy into the ground. Where's my cheese. I should write a book about once you make a decision you have to stop fucking revisiting it, and I'll call it "The Emu Principle" and I'll spend 80 of the 120 pages talking about how Emus don't run backwards, but they run far and fast and they knock over anything in their way and they survive on [insert whatever emus eat] and this analogy also works for your business and how it will behave if you apply The Emu Principle and tell Greg to shut the fuck up whenever he starts to complain about how he still doesn't think this was the right call and "maybe we should...". 

 

 

Edited May 5, 2023 by Celery Man

[Sam Lin 3550]

I would attend one of your seminars on The Emu Principle, if you offered free pizza. And the building had parking.

[Sam Lin 3550]

On 10/15/2022 at 9:12 PM, morehornsepower said:

Just finished "Turn the Ship Around" (David Marquet).  Fairly quick read, but a great take on how to build an empowered team.

Finished this a few days ago, definite quick read. But great, simple message, though I feel it could be made more concise. The steps in his process have names that are just unnecessarily complicated, and the process itself is a bit overcomplicated. I think a bit of editing would make this "management method" something that could be easily grasped by more people and therefore more effectively implemented.

To me, it comes down to Empower: Share Common Goal (and he mentions referring to Start with Why, which I am currently reading and will comment negatively on when I finish), Ensure Skillset, and Trust (but Verify).

Found a lot of parallels between the examples in the book and management structures I've experienced myself. Highly recommended. Easy read, easy concepts, fairly simple to act on, and big ROI effects. I would recommend this as a read to anyone wanting to improve "management" - and by that I mean anyone who has any responsibility for anyone else, at any level of an organization. This is a layman's book, entertaining to read, but with a strong, effective message.

[Sam Lin 3550]

Finished Start with Why, and Radical Candor.

Start with Why was weak and definitely fits the Emu method you mentioned above: find some cheese analogy, find some examples to fit, and blather on and on. Use it to sell Ted talks and corporate seminars. Part of the weakness is because so many of the examples are now poor examples due to the tides of change in history. He repeatedly cites examples like Harley, SW Airlines, Apple, Walmart, GM, Microsoft, and in many cases like Harley and SW, the "today version" of the example actually refutes his point. But my overall reaction to it was "what is his point?" On the surface it seemed to pass the Emu test, but think more about the statements he makes, try to apply more examples, and it just has no substance. Yes a company should have a clear goal or mission statement and employees should know it and feel it, but that is not the secret sauce that has allowed some companies to succeed and others fail.

Radical Candor is a useful one. I think it is too wordy and needs editing, it would be easier to implement and if it had a clearer statement, and it gets a bit lost explaning how to handle edge cases, but the message and techniques are applicable and useful for most.

Of what I've read in the past month (sort of cramming management books), I'd recommend Turn the Ship Around and The Undoing Project to anyone/everyone (and bought copies of Turn for some of my staff), Radical Candor to some, TF&S to some. Would not recommend Start.

[Celery Man 20931]

Definitely agree that Start With Why does the emu principle stuff, although I do think I find the concept a bit more useful than you. For me specifically as a product manager it helped me think usefully and have better conversations about what we should and shouldn’t be doing. Of course he does crawl up his own asshole and come out of his mouth. He markets the concept as the end all be all but I think maybe (outside of a lens for prioritization) it’s mostly useful for building brand loyalty or brand ID or whatever you ca the thing where customers have emotions about your company/product that goes beyond function and cost. SWA definitely feels that way to me, and Apple vs Dell makes sense to me in that way. Obviously not from the book but HEB is the brand that generates the strongest feelings like that from me (open or not) and I can easily tell you that their “why” looks something like “to serve and partner with our local communities”. And beyond the fact that they are the best grocery store on the planet that is why they are easily the thing I miss most about Texas.

But Sinek is irritating.

 

”The Emu Principle” is actually something I’m trying to improve with my team. My BiL is a business and marketing guru and I asked him what language I should use and what reading I should do - he recommended Extreme Ownership and specifically “disagree and commit” - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disagree_and_commit#:~:text=Disagree and commit is a,everybody must commit to it.

 

Attributed to Andrew Grove at Intel, who is also largely behind the OKR goal setting framework that I like and am having some success with this year.  Anyways, that is next on the list for me, although I’m trying to do more domain (biotech) reading this year. Slowly working on The Genesis Machine because I’ve also gone down a hip hop black hole and am listening to more music when cleaning every night.

[Celery Man 20931]

The other concept I need to figure out how to talk about better with spectrumy technical people is “answer the question first” or “ don’t explain everything again” or “don’t bury the necessary information in a victor hugo novel of mostly irrelevant details”. I know that makes me sound like a non technical asshole and maybe I am but you need to be able to have a conversation about “what does this thing do” or “is the important part of this thing this” without starting from an overview of the Big Bang.

[Sam Lin 3550]

That's really a tough one, as it depends more on the technical guy and not on how you ask. Yes you can ask and frame it better, but it ultimately comes down to the techie being able to give you a TL:DR or not. Many of them simply don't have that editing/writing ability; it's possibly the entire reason they became techies. The way you can help it yourself is...to become more technical, or at least ask more technically,, so you can ask them more specific questions that they can answer with specific answers, and you use that info to generate your own TL:DR.

Old boss used to say "don't write me a novel."

 

EDIT: Start with Why, your statement totally nails it. In keeping a company's focus, esp in a product role, it is absolutely key. My issue with it is as you say, that he's marketing it as an "end all be all," and it just isn't.

Edited May 22, 2023 by Sam Lin