Re:How Thomas Jefferson prepared for meetings
by munificent on Thursday March 03, 2011 @08:34PM
(#2286561)
One thing I've learned is how much surface quality of presentation matters. As much as we might pretend to be perfectly logical rational beings, psychology, aesthetics, and emotion are always part of our decision-making process. So when I present something, I try to have great material, but I also try to make it visually appealing, clearly-written, friendly, and warm. Makes a huge difference.
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A beautiful demo beats a working prototype, at least as far as management is concerned.
I've actually seen this at work, where I managed to hack together a working (but ugly) system only to experience a lot of push-back. Once I polished the output, the same idea was welcomed.
Oddly enough, I learned this lesson back in college. In one engineering design class, I got an A on an assignment that looked really cool, but didn't actually work. I didn't hide the brokenness at all: I clearly documented the fact that it produced utterly nonsensical results in my report and discussed how I would have fixed the problem.
In retrospect, I've decided that they were teaching me an important lesson, but I'm still not quite sure if it was intentional or not.