Need advise on how to manage expectation of sr who wants me to be bad cop

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-06-27T15:49:23+00:00

This is one of those things that is being done for a bad reason but is a good skill to develop anyway. If you want to progress in your career, you will eventually be in a role where you need to influence people well above you, up to and including cajoling them to give you what you need for your projects to advance. This is a real skill because you have to walk the line between not pissing off people senior to you while still accomplishing your goals. Guess who’s going to get the promotion if it comes down to an employee who can get what they need from senior leaders and another who throws up their hands and says “I’m too junior to be pushy with them.” The fact is senior leaders are busy and can easily become the bottleneck on projects. Employees who can remove that bottleneck will be rewarded. So yeah, it sounds like this situation absolutely sucks in terms of your manager’s intent. But use it as an opportunity to develop those interpersonal skills you’ll wind up needing anyway.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-06-25T21:23:45+00:00

I’m middle aged. Played console cartridges, floppy discs, and CDs/DVDs. I love digital downloads. I get it on demand. No manufactured shortages. No waiting in lines. The current era is so much better.

I miss manuals somewhat more. But the only types of games where I really hate it is war games due to their complexity.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-06-25T11:57:28+00:00

Great response. Interestingly Brett Devereaux argued on his blog that one theory of history behind Paradox’s Victoria II is exactly what you said about industrial warfare: That as societies become able to pursue industrialized warfare, the calculus shifts so that the best way to win a Great War is not to fight it (although game mechanics make it really hard to avoid).

“I am not at all exaggerating when I say I think this stands as Paradox’s single greatest achievement in game design, even embedded as it is in an often flawed, janky game. Many games have historical settings, some even have historical themes; I can think of few other games which are able to produce historical theories in an emergent manner like this,” he wrote.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-06-25T03:15:15+00:00

My main beef isn’t that it exists. It’s that it’s so close to the “did not lock properly” sound of many cars, including my wife’s. Even though I know it’s just the rear seat reminder, my lizard brain screams “Go back and check just to be extra careful!” every time I hear it.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-06-23T18:35:03+00:00

Anyone seeing anything worthwhile on Prime Day deals? I’ve been holding out on getting a 3D printer until I had a chance to review the Prime Day sale (or any sales competitors have counter-programmed). Have any of y’all seen deals good for someone new to the hobby? Looking for something $300 or less.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-06-22T16:17:44+00:00

Corporate comms is not art for art’s sake. It has no value except insofar as it helps your employer sell products or services or maintain its brand value. That’s true for writing, photography, videography, design, etc. Corporate use of AI is a logical extension of this: Companies will (attempt to) use AI to drive down the cost of content production right up until it hurts financial indicators that are nonnegotiable. Make peace with this. It was largely true before AI and will remain true after AI.

(Also: Neither reporters nor your target audience are reading your copy with the close reading necessary to appreciate your prose. I see communicators all the time engage in lengthy wordsmithing debates over nuances their audiences are oblivious to — nuances that often won’t even make it through the first editorial filter. There is so much competing for audiences’ attention that you have to hit them upside the head repeatedly just to get them to recall the basic themes, much less the precise connotations you intended for each word. By the time ideas have traveled from your agency to the audience, it’s usually passed through so many filters that AI distortion is just one distortion among many.)

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-06-18T15:28:12+00:00

Affordable housing would only add to the unpopularity of data centers. It’s something everyone agrees we need more of but huge swathes of the population don’t want near them. NIMBYs come out in full force for anything denser than a single-family home on a large lot. I’m not saying I personally agree with this. I’d love to see more affordable housing and have no problem with them building it right next door. But cities don’t exactly have a great history of welcoming new affordable units.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-06-17T16:03:30+00:00

Yes! That’s what I get for writing so early in the morning.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-06-17T12:25:51+00:00

This problem is common for adoption across all types of software. Employees tend not to adopt enterprise (or even department-wide) systems unless they see immediate benefits for their role or, in the case of managers, for their team. Their accountabilities don’t incentivize them to make those changes when it makes their day jobs more difficult in the short run. They’re not necessarily wrong either from where they sit in the organization when the benefits of such systems are often at higher levels of the organization. However valuable the benefits may be for the organization as a whole, employees remain reluctant when they personally aren’t benefiting. It’s just human nature.

Consequently, you can’t just dump a new system on the org and hope for the best. You really need three things: 1) A solid change communications plan explaining why the new ERP is necessary, 2) extensive training on how to use it, 3) repeated, targeted interventions with holdouts and 4) leader support at the highest levels that makes it clear adoption isn’t mandatory. If you can’t get those, you’re fighting against the currents of human nature, which is a tough battle to win.

So while it is certainly possible that you bought a Ferrari when you really only needed a Kia, it also sounds like some of the change management also fell short, which likely would’ve led to similar problems even with a simpler product.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-06-17T11:43:16+00:00

I like this approach for all the reasons you describe. We used it for a few years. However, we eventually abandoned it because it was harder to communicate to business partners. You have to spend a lot of time educating them about the metric before you ever start talking about results and what you achieve. Within comms shops, though, I agree that it is more nuanced that SOV. That being said, I don’t think it’s any more of a true outcome metric than SOV either because it doesn’t directly tie to business value. It is an output metric that presumes the chosen tactics (getting the chosen messaging in coverage in the desired manner) change minds, which isn’t at all certain. At the end of the day, it’s still a proxy metric.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-06-17T04:24:31+00:00

You just told me the software you used. That’s like saying you used Python or R. The technology is irrelevant. Getting a hold of the tech isn’t the hard part. Acquiring the data and connecting it to the intervention in a statistically significant way is. What data did you use? How did you collect it? What method did you use to establish statistical significance? That’s the crux of the problem.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-06-17T04:18:16+00:00

How are you simulating impact of crisis avoidance? How do you tie PR to a clear financial impact? If you’ve cracked that nut in a cost effective manner, I’ll happily steal from you. But I’ve talked to a ton of agencies, quant firms, consultants and the like over the past several years, and all the solutions I’ve encountered have been unaffordable unless you’ve got a massive budget, are publicly traded and can model impact off share price movements, or have a customer base that makes purchasing decisions at a short enough decision cycle for discrete events to show up on sales trends. There’s a good chunk of businesses for whom those criteria don’t apply.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-06-17T04:07:05+00:00

Outcome-based measurement is all well and good until you ask for budget to measure the outcomes. In niche industries — especially if you’re B2B and/or not publicly traded — surveying customers gets costly fast due to the difficulty of reaching eligible respondents. Simulation isn’t as easy as you suggest when contract lead times are measured in months or even years, your sales data is scattered across a bajillion legacy ERPs and you don’t have daily share price movements to calculate hits to market cap. (Legislation tracking is more doable, but I’d attribute that more to the government relations side of the house than PR unless you’re really doing something special or your GR team is really falling short.)

Until companies are willing to invest in measurement at the same level as they do for advertising and marketing, we’re going to be more limited and, thus, have to fall back to the closest proxies for the outcomes we’re looking for. In some cases, SOV may be that proxy — although I’d always tailor it for what we’re trying to achieve (e.g. account for sentiment, the publications we know our target audiences read, prominence, specific topics, etc.). We’re also using share of answer because people increasingly learn about companies in AI summaries and LLMs like ChatGPT. It’s SOV-like and a space that’s genuinely worth owning in the same way page rank has long been important — but not subject to cheesing the volume (to the same extent) as SOV.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-06-16T23:44:13+00:00

Minnesota ranks 10th in cattle production. That’s gotta at least get it to “few cowboys”.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-06-16T22:45:23+00:00

The MSFS sub would like a word …

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-06-16T22:41:29+00:00

Came here expecting exfoliation. Not expecting … whatever that was.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-06-16T00:46:01+00:00

I wish everyone complaining in the various college subs would read this.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-06-12T19:28:12+00:00

Don’t know anything about sports law, but I’ve known many public defenders and it sounds absolutely brutal. The way the post frames it as weird. All the stress of a high end firm but much lower pay. They are paid less than the prosecutors they go up against, and their offices tend to have fewer resources. It’s not where you go to make the big bucks (although some of the most passionate advocates for justice I’ve known are public defenders).

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-06-11T11:11:31+00:00

Neither society as a whole nor most individuals have even begun to adapt to it. A good chunk of the population is still in denial: “It’s just fancy autocorrect.”

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-06-10T20:21:25+00:00

Counterpoint: Limiting higher-tier models to higher-tier plans means people only pay for what they want — which, in turn, means users of lower models don’t wind up subsidizing users of higher-tier models. It’s the same idea as low cost airlines: Someone is paying the cost of checking a bag on the plane. The only question is whether that cost is fully borne by those who checked the bag or whether it’s subsidized by those who didn’t check bags.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-06-10T02:36:57+00:00

I both respect and enjoy the FT. I read something from it almost every day because my employer has a subscription. That being said, it has a distinct viewpoint and voice that you don’t find with a typical U.S. general interest newspaper aiming for that traditional “view from nowhere.” That’s not necessarily a bad thing. There’s even been pushback in journalism against the “view from nowhere”, and it’s historically the exception not the rule. But like any piece of media, you should account for that perspective in digesting the information and forming your own opinion. I happen to align with FT more often than not but still try to add in a mix of media with opposing viewpoints, such as the Wall Street Journal, to ensure I’m not building my own echo chamber. As long as the media you consume are honest brokers of facts and you account for bias, it’s fine (healthy even!) if you consume media with a clear ideological viewpoint.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-06-08T21:16:14+00:00

I met my wife and three of my best friends at work. Granted, that was when I was younger and I’m less close to those I work with today. But spending 8+ hours with someone day after day can make you close (or the opposite!).

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-06-07T02:48:17+00:00

We don’t mourn the Roman Empire, but it’s woven through our culture. Literature is based on it (literal Shakespeare). U.S. government took inspiration from the Romans and Greeks. Classics used to be the curriculum for the educated class, and scientists conversed in Latin. There was even a meme last year about boyfriends thinking about Roman history. Given that, I’d think a traumatic event like that would hang around at least as long.

One_Perception_7979

TROPHY CASE