How to Win Arguments and Manipulate Managers

So, after nearly a decade of doing this wrong, please learn from my mistakes. These skills should be used for good (improving the company’s chance of success) but are also applicable in a more Machievellian sense, if that’s your sort of thing. To make this feel more real, I’m going to walk you through a work of analysis I did here at Every. Using i

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Whenever I’m presenting an analysis, I like to start with the story of how we got to the need for this analysis to be with and why this math matters—fairly normal advice. However, I’ll take it a step further.

Rather than rattle off the numbers along with my suggested fix, I’ll wave three red story flags in front of the executive’s eyes. Each discret

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Figure 3.8 The expected and actual experience of presenting to executives. My general approach to presenting to senior leaders is: Tie topic to business value. One or two sentences to answer the question “Why should anyone care?” Establish historical narrative. Two to four sentences to help folks understand how things are going, how we got here, an

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The more you ground your analysis in the founder’s personal history and intuition, the easier it is to get what you want approved.

Your success as a designer depends equally on your relationships as it does on your design talent . The powerful people you need as allies will likely know little about design and you will have to teach and persuade them. Your amazing ideas and concepts can’t help the world if they are never built by your organization. Your ability to explain your ... See more

Say you’re presenting a new product concept to the executive team, and you know you won’t get their buy-in unless Trent, the president of the enterprise division, gets excited about the idea, because they always defer to his instincts on new initiatives. Appeal first to Trent’s entrepreneurial nature by describing how exciting the new market is—whi

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 I thought my job was to be right. I thought that was how I proved my worth to the company. But that was all wrong. My job was to get things done and doing anything meaningful past a certain point requires more than one person. If you are right but nobody wants to work with you, then how valuable are you really? How much can you realistically ... See more