The Illusion of Output

My take is that C-level people are oriented around constraints and results around the organization as a whole (if the board, regulators, and those that they answer to let them be so.)

If you engage them at the level of "here is how a situation impacts the bottom line" you often get good results.

Middle managers see themselves hemmed in by politics so they are not easy to sway this way and there is no better way to turn them against you than to bypass them and talk to superiors on this level.

Attributing productivity is a fraught issue. Some people are good at tooting their own horn. On a good day I come across triumphantly, on a bad day I can come across as a loser.

A highly productive software dev can look like somebody who slows the team down; other people do the 20% of the work that looks like 80% of the value which is either not realized (80% wasn't good enough) or realized at great cost (senior person had do the other 80% of the work but it cost 160% because they had to reverse-engineer a half-baked scheme.)

People think they can measure the productivity of sales people, but I have developed products for sales managers and I am not so sure. There's that star salesman, for instance, who sleeps with the wives of your best customers and leaves a big mess for you to clean up.