This month I’m listening to the audiobook “Influence: Science and Practice” by Dr. Robert Cialdini to understand the psychology of persuasion, why people say yes, through six core principles: reciprocation, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity. Cialdini is an academic, not a salesman, and he provides compelling examples and anecdotes. I don’t like to be manipulated and I don’t want to get what I want through manipulative practices, but it pays to understand what makes people tick. Effective leaders seem to have an intuition about this. For some it may come as “common sense,” while others may feel like they just don’t get people. I’d put myself in the latter camp. I can even confess that I chose my university major based on that.
Actually, funny story, all my life I thought I was going to be a lawyer. I even started my undergrad with my major declared as “pre-law.” Only after taking the Intro to Criminology course and a class called “Social Problems” did I realize that I did not want to be a lawyer. I thought people were too unpredictable. I was so turned off by having to deal with the complexities of human behavior that I wanted to do the opposite. I figured I’d be a terrible lawyer. So I asked myself, what’s the opposite of being a lawyer? And Engineering came up.
The thing is, most problems are people problems, not tech problems, and tech is a tool… for people. You still need to understand people to be an effective leader. You still need to know how to communicate your work in terms that resonate with folks. For example, our customers are not going to care that our agent is written in Go with an Actor Model using a message-passing scheme and a state machine gated by dependency transitions. I mean, to me, that’s cool, but what does that matter to our users? They want to be able to use our system and they want it to work 100% of the time.
Anyway, the point is, understanding people is 100% crucial. This book helps.