How to argue with a non listening CEO

Priscilla Claman in Harvard Business Review

A senior vice president I know was working on a merger and had come up against a roadblock.

He pulled the merger implementation team into a room and said: “We’ve analyzed it over and over, but it really isn’t possible to complete this merger in the time frame Walter wants. Now, what do we do?”

Walter was the CEO. He had a reputation for not listening to anyone who disagreed with him. But, missing the merger deadline would be an embarrassing and very public failure. Walter had made a big deal of completing the merger in three months. Someone had to convince him that the merger wasn’t going to happen then, but no one wanted to volunteer. Everyone knew that Walter was a shoot-the-messenger kind of guy.

The team tried several things to get Walter to understand. First, they prepared a data-rich PowerPoint presentation. Walter just waved it away. Then, they hired a respected consultant, who confirmed the fact that it couldn’t be done in the time allotted. Walter just thought she was the team’s patsy. All the while, the clock was ticking, getting closer and closer to failure.

Finally, the SVP came up with something that worked. He knew one of Walter’s buddies who was within months of retirement. Walter wouldn’t fire him. Using all the data the team had prepared, the SVP convinced Walter’s buddy to get the message through to Walter, and disaster was averted.

This true story contains a lot of ideas for how to disagree successfully with a person who is senior to you. Fortunately, there aren’t that many senior managers as unapproachable as Walter out there. Still, disagreeing with someone senior isn’t something you want to do every day. Save it for important issues, even in organizations that say they encourage people to express their own opinions. If you disagree too often, you will get a reputation for negativity.



There are ways to disagree successfully with a senior person without having your head handed to you. Here are some ideas:

Don’t just blurt out your point of view; be strategic about it. Think it through. Why do you disagree? Could your disagreement be perceived as “political?” Or do you have the good of the organization at heart? You are more likely to be believed if you don’t have anything to gain from your point of view.

Make sure you’re right. Senior people usually have access to more information than the people below them. Is there something you might be missing?

Do what the SVP did, and bounce your point of view off of a few trusted peers. If you can’t convince them, you’re probably not going to convince the senior person. Ask for their feedback on how to be persuasive. But don’t ask your direct reports — they may not want to disagree with a senior person!

Prepare a presentation – no loaded words or hypotheticals; use data and charts instead. Keep it businesslike. PowerPoint can help keep your presentation brief and to the point.

Find a respected, credible expert to go over your conclusions. She doesn’t have to be an outside consultant, but she should be recognized for her expertise by your senior person.

The SVP’s buddy strategy is also a good approach. People trust people they are friends with, particularly if they are at the same level in an organization. Find someone you know who is the same rank as the more senior person you are trying to convince. Persuade him using the data you have put together. Then, ask him to share that information with his buddy.



It takes courage to disagree with someone senior to you. But it is a professional skill you need to learn. Sooner or later, like the senior vice president in the story, you will face a situation where you have to disagree. Besides, if you just agree all the time, senior people will think of you as a doormat with nothing to contribute. To gain the respect of senior people, you need to learn when it’s important to disagree, and then, how to do it in a strategic way.

Arrogant Indian liberals are doing a big disservice to liberalism

Gurcharan Das in Times of India

A few months ago, I was at an attractive event in Delhi, surrounded by elegantly dressed, articulate Indians and a sprinkling of foreigners. Into this privileged gathering walked an awkward young man who someone recognized from Hindi television. He seemed to be lost and was mostly ignored until someone provoked him and there followed a loud, ugly argument over the JNU controversy. He put up a spirited defence of the Hindu nationalist position but he was quickly shouted down. He felt humiliated and left hurriedly. Once he was gone, the ‘secular-liberal’ gathering relaxed, but not before heaping condescension on this ‘low life’ with his ‘crazy ideas.’

I do not believe in sedition and I did not agree with any of the unwanted guest’s arguments. But I felt sorry for him and unhappy at the way he was treated. Of course, he was narrow-minded in his majoritarian approach to minorities; he was bigoted in the way he characterized Muslims. But he was also a vulnerable human being. He was less well-educated, and his weak English put him at a social disadvantage. Instead of empathy, he got supercilious scorn from a self-important liberal establishment that encourages diversity of identity but is intolerant of the diversity of ideas.

Disagree, don’t demonize: A condescending attitude only reinforces resentment and pushes Hindutva supporters deeper into its embrace.

Over the past two years an unhappy divide has grown, something we did not expect when the nation elected Prime Minister Modi on the promise of ‘sabka saath, sabka vikas’. I am a classical (not a left) liberal and do not share the beliefs of Hindu nationalists. I do not eat beef but I will defend your right to eat it. I was disturbed by the violence at Dadri and upset that the Prime Minister reacted so late. A few weeks ago, I was outraged by Swami Adityanath’s bizarre demand for the arrest of Akhlaq’s family for cow slaughter. I deplore the violence of rightwing extremists around the world. Having said this, I am also saddened by the arrogance of my fellow liberals. In the name of tolerance they behave just as intolerantly towards those whose beliefs differ from theirs. They are just as guilty of tribal behaviour as their opponents. And this may be a reason why liberalism is not growing in our country.

The problem with secular liberals is that we go to the same elite schools and universities where the faculty is liberal and left-leaning. Some economics teachers may have shifted after the reforms from Marxism to market-based thinking, but culturally everyone is homogeneous. It is hard for a Hindu nationalist to get into an elite college, either as a student or a teacher. It may be because the candidate is less comfortable in English but there exists a clear bias in favour of liberal privilege. (It is easier, oddly enough, for a Dalit or an OBC to break into elite ranks because of reservations.) If you believe, as I do, that the Hindutva ideology is based on empirically false grounds, we must encourage its supporters to enter top universities and engage in free debate. Only thus will India produce genuine conservative intellectuals, whose arguments will be based on verifiable facts rather than on technological fantasies from the Puranas. By demonizing them or treating them condescendingly, we reinforce resentment and throw them deeper into Hindutva’s embrace. As a result, the liberal ideology remains confined to a small elite. And then we complain, “Why are there so few liberals in India?”

The arrogance of the secular liberal is not only morally wrong, it is bad electoral strategy. If the Congress or the Left parties want to convert the voter to a liberal ideology, they will not succeed by the sort of contemptuous and dismissive talk spokespersons engage in on television screens night after night. Liberals need to remember their own creed: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Instead, they practise: “I disapprove of what you say; so shut up, you idiot.” This sort of behaviour drives people away. The liberal ideal is too precious to become the preserve of a political party or of sanctimonious intellectuals. It is also not an issue of the Right versus the Left — all Indians must embrace the liberal idea of a plural India that protects minorities. But we shall only win the heads and hearts of people with humility and by example.

The dilemmas of trying to live ethically

Eva Wiseman in The Guardian


My friend and I bought the same book on Amazon, and it changed us, but in quite different ways. The book was Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, an examination of the gruesome way poultry and cattle are slaughtered to produce cheap meat for people like me. A quarter of the way through I closed it, tucked it on to the shelf – I knew that if I continued to read I would no longer be able to enjoy roast chicken, or Peking duck, or oily lardons knotted in spaghetti. I knew I’d have to be a better person; I’d have to live a slightly less lovely life. I stopped reading. While it opened my eyes to my failings and limits, Becca, who finished the book, became a vegetarian.

As I read about the ethical problems with Airbnb, Uber and every other smiling company that makes our lives easier, I am under no illusions about my own goodness. I believe it is almost impossible to live ethically as a human being. There is no way for humans to inhabit the world, is there, without spoiling something crucial. We are massive ruiners. If we want to stay clean and warm, and if we want to have a laugh, it is highly likely somebody or something will feel the negative effects of our basic joy. And when we do act ethically, isn’t the main gain simply a “sense of wellbeing”, perhaps the most vanilla of the senses? However hard we try, there will be something we get wrong. Since giving up meat, Becca brushes off regular questions from local bores about things like the carbon footprint of her salad, yet on she crunches, trying.

Here are some of the ways in which I am dreadful. Regardless of the books I buy, whether on meat eating or true crime, I continue to buy them from sites that avoid tax and treat their workers like machines, because they arrive so promptly and because they cost 10p plus postage. I pay that 10p on a phone built under slave-like conditions with materials the profits of which may or may not have funded a genocide. More: our flat is on the market for wild and pretend money, which means I am becoming part of the problem crippling my beloved, disgusting city. I even arranged flowers on our kitchen table with the quiet thought that potential buyers might pay even more for a place that smells of sweetpeas. I am scum. Worse, when I see people trying to be better – when I have lunch with Becca, with her peanut noodles and fishless fingers – I feel a silent judgment. It comes from inside me; she doesn’t care what I eat. It’s me. I feel bad about the route my sandwich filling took to get to my plate, and sitting with her reminds me of that, so I will be tempted to try and undermine her choice by asking about the leather of her shoes. Scum. But I guilt-barter. We each have a certain moral budget, and I choose to spend mine on meat and Amazon. I choose my thing.

When you stare straight into the horrors of the modern world, they can blind you. There’s a moment before I click to buy the 10p book when I begin to add up the wrongs I’ve committed that day, that hour. The long shower, with the exfoliator that kills fish, the bottle of water I bought on the way to work. The £7 dress, the potentially trafficked manicure, the leftover lunch I threw away, the lights I left on, the heating in May. And I vow to be better, soon, as payback. My attempts, however, like signing an online petition, barely touch the sides of my shittiness. It is impossible to live ethically.

But how bad should we feel, really? Surely the responsibility shouldn’t all be ours. Products and services should not come to market if there is any chance they have passed through the hands of a slave. It doesn’t sound like too much to ask. And shouldn’t there be an equivalent to the nutritional facts on tins, a label with quantities of evil? We’d be able to budget more effectively – an Amazon Prime here, a speak-up-when-an-acquaintance-makes-a-racist-joke there. That’s how I’m learning to live. A charity bake sale, an Uber home. A meat-free day, but wearing a really cheap T-shirt.
Putting down that book has made me look at how much I choose not to see. It’s no revolutionary realisation, but as we find increasingly meaningless ways to balance our ethical chequebooks, I am embracing my limits. As long as we try not to be the complete worst and accept our scumminess, then there is little point in asking how to be good. The answer, surely, is to try and simply be good enough.

Economics Struggles to Cope With Reality

Noah Smith in Bloomberg

There are basically four different activities that all go by the name of macroeconomics. But they actually have relatively little to do with each other. Understanding the differences between them is helpful for understanding why debates about the business cycle tend to be so confused.

The first is what I call “coffee-house macro,” and it’s what you hear in a lot of casual discussions. It often revolves around the ideas of dead sages -- Friedrich Hayek, Hyman Minsky and John Maynard Keynes. It doesn’t involve formal models, but it does usually contain a hefty dose of political ideology.

The second is finance macro. This consists of private-sector economists and consultants who try to read the tea leaves on interest rates, unemployment, inflation and other indicators in order to predict the future of asset prices (usually bond prices). It mostly uses simple math, though advanced forecasting models are sometimes employed. It always includes a hefty dose of personal guesswork.

The third is academic macro. This traditionally involves professors making toy models of the economy -- since the early ’80s, these have almost exclusively been DSGE models (if you must ask, DSGE stands for dynamic stochastic general equilibrium). Though academics soberly insist that the models describe the deep structure of the economy, based on the behavior of individual consumers and businesses, most people outside the discipline who take one look at these models immediately think they’re kind of a joke. They contain so many unrealistic assumptions that they probably have little chance of capturing reality. Their forecasting performance is abysmal. Some of their core elements are clearly broken. Any rigorous statistical tests tend to reject these models instantly, because they always include a hefty dose of fantasy.

The fourth type I call Fed macro. The Federal Reserve uses an eclectic approach, involving both data and models. Sometimes the models are of the DSGE type, sometimes not. Fed macro involves taking data from many different sources, instead of the few familiar numbers like unemployment and inflation, and analyzing the information in a bunch of different ways. And it inevitably contains a hefty dose of judgment, because the Fed is responsible for making policy.

How can there be four very different activities that all go by the same name, and all claim to study and understand the same phenomena? My view is that academic macro has basically failed the other three.

Because academic macro models are so out of touch with reality, people in causal coffee-house discussions can’t refer to academic research to help make their points. Instead, they have to turn back to the old masters, who if vague and wordy were at least describing a world that had some passing resemblance to the economy we observe in our daily lives.

And because academic macro is so useless for forecasting -- including predicting the results of policy changes -- the financial industry can’t use it for practical purposes. I’ve talked to dozens of people in finance about why they don’t use DSGE models, and some have indeed tried to use them -- but they always dropped the models after poor performance.

Most unfortunately, the Fed has had to go it alone when studying how the macroeconomy really works. Regional Fed banks and the Federal Reserve Board function as macroeconomic think tanks, hiring top-level researchers to do the grubby data work and broad thinking that academia has decided is beneath it. But that leaves many of the field’s brightest minds locked in the ivory tower, playing with their toys.

Fortunately, this may be changing. Justin Wolfers, a University of Michigan professor and well-known economics commentator, recently presented a set of slides at a conference celebrating the career of Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Olivier Blanchard. The slides, although short, are indicative of the sea change underway in the macro field.

Wolfers discusses how some of the main pillars of modern academic macro theory are now being challenged. The idea of “rational expectations,” which says that people on average use the correct mental model of the economy when they make their decisions, is being challenged by top professors, and many are looking at alternatives.
But that’s just the beginning -- far deeper changes may be in the offing. Wolfers suggested abandoning DSGE models, saying that they “haven’t worked.” That he said this at a conference honoring Blanchard, who was an important DSGE modeling pioneer, is a sign that the winds have shifted.

In place of the typical DSGE fare, Wolfers suggests that the new macroeconomics will focus on empirics and falsification -- in other words, looking at reality instead of making highly imaginative assumptions about it. He also says that macro will be fertilized by other disciplines, such as psychology and sociology, and will incorporate elements of behavioral economics.

I’d go even farther. I think the new macroeconomics won’t just be new kinds of models and a more empirical focus; it will redefine what “macroeconomics” even means.

As originally conceived, macro is about explaining national-level data series like employment, output and prices. Eventually, economists realized that to explain those things, they would need to understand the smaller pieces of the economy, such as consumer behavior or competition between companies. At first, they just imagined or postulated how these elements worked -- that’s the core of DSGE.

Economists now realize that consumers and businesses behave in ways that are much more complicated and difficult to understand. So there has been increased interest in what’s called “macro-focused micro” -- studies of businesses, competition, markets and individual behavior that have relevance for macro even though they weren’t traditionally included in the field. Examples of this would include studies of business dynamism, price adjustment, financial bubbles and differences between workers.

Let’s hope more and more macroeconomists focus on these things, instead of trying to make big, grandiose, but ultimately vacuous models of booms and recessions. When we understand the pieces of the economy better, we’ll have a much better chance of grasping the whole. If this continues, maybe the ivory tower will have more relevance for the Fed, the financial industry and maybe even for our coffee-house discussions.