The other day, I had a quick sit down meeting with my manager’s manager. He’s a busy guy and we literally had 3-4 minutes to hammer something out on a web page. Most of the content we needed was already there somewhere, we just had to reformat things. As I watched him cut and paste text by going through the “Edit” menu of his browser, I thought I might just die before we finished.
I couldn’t think of a non-condescending way to tell him that he could either right-click, or (heaven forbid) use a keyboard shortcut, or even just drag and drop the text to make his life much easier. After several minutes of him fighting through this process and me holding back screams of pain, we were done. As I walked out of the room, I remembered many such instances of this episode from my days of desk-side IT help.
We’ve all been through it, but I’m open to any suggestions on how you help someone at an executive level see the light without insulting their intelligence. What do you say when, “Hey moron” just won’t do?
Sometimes there just is no other way
Do not repress the anger!
Be strong, you are not alone
Annon
The question is who get’s insulted here. Doesn’t your executive say: “Hey freak, don’t bother me with your unimportant techniques?” It’s possibly the point that’s it’s not really important for an executive to know who to C&P with today’s OS’s.