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From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Moving from Another Language to LISP?
Date: 07 Oct 2002 11:32:50 +0000
Organization: Naggum Software, Oslo, Norway
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* Steve Graham
| If you were trying to convince the management to move to LISP, what would
| you say or do?

  I have no experience with convincing management to move to Common Lisp,
  but as a consultant to companies who already had failure on their hands,
  or a problem to which they did not know a solution, offering Common Lisp
  and a significantly better chance to succeed has not been met with much
  resistance.  Now, as a consultant, they may have trusted /me/ rather than
  my tools and may well have called me in the first place to help them out
  of their predicament, so what experience I have may not be all that useful
  to somebody else.  However, one thing should be generally applicable:

  Size up the problem and spend as little company resources as possible to
  determine that you can solve the problem.  This may involve solving part
  of it for "free", just to demonstrate how you would do things.  This
  achieves two separate goals.  The first is to show your management that
  you know your stuff and that they should trust you with the problem.  The
  second is to show your management that you are willing to take risks of
  your own in order to "prove" something to them.  Normally, both of these
  are valued by your management.  If not, seek employment elsewhere, as
  they do not trust you or appreciate your efforts to solve their problems.

  To really succeed, tell your management about what you intend to do up
  front, and show that you can do the preliminary work without involving a
  lot of people and that you can deliver what you promised on time, then
  show them what you need in order to finish the task.  If you have a track
  record of delivering on time, that also helps a lot.

  Note that this stresses "do" over "say".  "Say" alone never cuts it.

-- 
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway

Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder.
Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.