Top Highlights

• Over time, as they learn to trust me, they stop trying to fool me. I am also careful never to insist that geeks stay focused on a single project. It's the nature of how they work to be working on ten different things at once, some of which have nothing to do with any of their actual assignments.
• The trust that geeks and suits can develop for one another can get you through very tough times.
• We found books about the communication problems between lower-level employees and higher-level employees. There are books for managers about how to supervise technologists, and books for techies about how to create presentations that business people will understand. But none addresses the actual culprit behind many of these problems, the cultural c...
• It's that, on an even more fundamental level, geeks and suits each see what they do in a different light. They have different priorities, different agendas, different criteria for defining success, and different views of how the world works. And most of the time, they don't trust each other to have each other's best interests at heart.
• Business people complained to us that the technologists they worked with cared more about getting the "latest and greatest" software or device than about actually doing their jobs. Geeks responded that the business people had no respect for the technology and what it could do. Suits griped that technologists spoke gobbledygook and could not make th...