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Excellent summary of how to be an effective programmer. In any group situation, it's not good enough to merely be right.

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It's even worse than that. If you work in a large hierarchical company you can be right and be able to present your correctness in a very clear and useful way. But it is unlikely that your superior is going to allow you speak directly to his superior. That is how politics work. Which brings us back to the original article.

This is why you build a consensus. Selling your idea directly to the person in charge of making the decision is less convincing than disseminating the idea across the organization. Arrange for the superior's superior to hear it from his/her trusted associates and then hand it back down to you as a managerial directive.

As always, the only way to make someone do what you want them to do is to convince them that they want to do it because it's in their interest. Simply presenting a good idea directly to the person in charge won't be enough if the idea represents a change to entrenched organizational policies.

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