In my years of industry, I've discovered some "dark arts". They can make you more effective at work, but have inherent scaling limitations and dangerous side effects. Here is the story how I derived my first dark art.
A year into my new job, I still felt like a failure. I was an account manager, yet I sucked at negotiations. Despite extensive preparation and a deep understanding of how my technology worked, my proposals never met customer needs. Feedback was relentless: my product was too expensive, not reliable, and execution problems were due to my incompetence. Wounded by these failures, I used each instance as motivation to work harder, later, and more creatively. But by the time COVID hit, I was ready to self-demote back to engineering. Thank goodness for COVID.
You see, COVID levelled the playing field for stress. Once my negotiation counterparts started experiencing lockdown stress, they behaved a lot more like me. They were simultaneously working harder, less effective, and more pliable. The implication was spooky: frazzled people could be manipulated to my benefit. It was also clear why I myself was miserable: I had been hazed for negotiation leverage.
Many readers will chuckle at my naivety, noting that such methods have been well-known forever - Sun Tzu was writing about it in 5th century BC! I abstractly knew about these methods, but somehow this knowledge didn’t leave me any less pliable. But once I viscerally understood, how should I respond? Within the scope of the job, it was easy:
Failure Mode #1:
Assigning self-worth relative to positive feedback at job
Solution:
- Cease caring about customer feedback in job
Failure Mode #2:
Responding to noisiest problem, instead of most impactful problem
Solution:
- Reduced cycles of learning; intentionally slow response times
Almost overnight, I recalibrated from a "how do I help?" personality to a posture of indifference. My management sensed the change and loved it. I could now parse the important issues from the noise, and I no longer signaled weakness. I started winning negotiations, partially because I was less vulnerable, and partially because I was more focused.