Three Blind Men and the Elephant

Ok, you asked for it. Here is another one of my aphorisms on the strange bedfellows that engineers, sales people and executives make.

Engineers think they create the products that define the company. In creating, they in their own reckoning are gods. However the average sales person’s line of thought is: If I don’t sell the #$@$ that you nerds produce, you geeks might as well be flipping burgers for a living. They are the pragmatists, the breadwinners. The executives think their vision IS the company: first there was light. It is inevitable that each of these groups differ and often with undesirable consequences for the organization. Often times, the executives are focused on what appears to the engineers to be touchy-feely nonsense. Executives view the engineers as necessary evil. Salespeople view the engineers as geeks disconnected from market realities and the executives as leeches living off their pragmatism.