The Customer Lies
An engineer of a company called me saying: “Our COO wants us to evaluate your software for our product design”. Then we set a meeting with him and the COO.
This morning I went there; a first technical meeting with the designers, before seeing the COO. They said the software would be used as an on-off application on a single project. They found the software difficult to learn, therefore they asked me for a quotation for a consultancy project. Then, the COO joined the meeting. I resumed what I was asked by his engineers, and this is what he said: “I don’t need you to design my product, I want my engineers to do that for all our products”. His engineers nodded in agreement.
Customers lie, for many personal reasons. Rephrasing the Newton’s law of inertia:
An object (an engineer) at rest (working in Research & Development) will remain at rest (will use the same technology, methods) unless acted upon by an external and unbalanced force (unless their boss twists their ears).
Posted on mar 7, 2007 by Giorgio Buccilli
(1 votes, average: 4,00 out of 5)
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PierG on gio, 8th mar 2007 15:40
Great post!
Some thoughts:
1. Not sure if ‘to lie’ is the right verb. I think we often don’t say anything to be sure anybody can understand what he prefer
2. Yes, sometimes happens that an employee is not completely aligned on his boss’ strategy (and he probably doesn’t agree)
3. Not agreeing with your boss is not necessarily wrong: and, at the end (= after some reasoning), we all work as a team in the same direction
PierG
http://pierg.wordpress.com