{"id":97,"date":"2004-11-25T09:59:00","date_gmt":"2004-11-25T09:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=97"},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-30T08:00:00","slug":"ceo-barbie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/2004\/11\/25\/ceo-barbie\/","title":{"rendered":"CEO Barbie"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was talking to my co-worker yesterday, and we picked up on the thread of that conversation we had about <a href=http:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/2004\/10\/07\/#self_management>management by conversation<\/a>.  In fact, the same thing happened as what I described in that post, except that he was the one doing the asking; he walked over to my cube, and asked me a question.  While he was clarifying the question, he realized what he needed to do, and went back to his cube, without me having to contribute anything of substance other than a couple interrogatories.  After we commented on the joys of being able to manage without having to know anything, he mentioned that at his previous company, it was a running joke that the CEO only had four questions to ask: &#8220;How long will this take?&#8221;, &#8220;How much is it going to cost?&#8221;, &#8220;Can you do it faster?&#8221;, and &#8220;What can go wrong?&#8221;  The CEO didn&#8217;t even have to listen to the answers; just asking the questions forced people to figure out their plans.<\/p>\n<p>In light of that, and in light of the teddy bear story <a href=http:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/2004\/10\/07\/#self_management>I previously related<\/a>, we were thinking that we should get one of the infamous <a href=http:\/\/www.sniggle.net\/barbie.php>&#8220;Math is hard!&#8221;<\/a> talking Barbies, replace the messages with those four questions, dress her up in a sharp business suit, and sell CEO Barbie.  I can see the sales pitch now: &#8220;Tired of paying millions of dollars for your latest and greatest CEO candidate?  Just hire CEO Barbie for $29.95 + shipping!&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was talking to my co-worker yesterday, and we picked up on the thread of that conversation we had about management by conversation. In fact, the same thing happened as what I described in that post, except that he was the one doing the asking; he walked over to my cube, and asked me a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-97","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}