Saying No and Offend

Back then, when people like Steve Jobs reflected that one of the hardest things in leadership is saying "no", I didn't quite truly understand what they meant.

I naturally have a tendency to say "no" to things, almost instinctively sidestepping the idea that people might get offended when you do so.

I personally don't really get a lot offended when people reject my ideas. I'm kinda used to it actually. So I only very slowly realized that many people are actually very upset when their ideas get rejected. I don't think I'll ever fully grasp it, even today. I still often get people apparently triggered when I reply to their comments on social media, on what I personally perceive as mild disagreement or rebuttal. Imagine the reaction when you just outright reject an idea they've been working on for weeks or months.

For some people, the ego can become bigger than I could ever imagine.

And I guess Steve stuck to saying "no" to things and people call him an asshole. Maybe he's really an asshole (I don't know him personally), but there are a lot of assholes in the world and they often don't get called out. It's only when you personally slight enough people by rejecting their ideas and hurting their egos that you'll be consistently called out as an asshole. That's an interesting corollary that I didn't expect when they say "it's hard to say no".

And as I become privy to business decisions on a higher level, I feel the pain of saying "no" ever more strongly. I'm "lucky" in that I almost never have the responsibility to decide whether to say yes or no (I'm usually in an advisory role at most), except maybe at the pull request level, but in many situations I could always feel the potential political backlash when you simply reject a proposal even if it's looks like the right thing to do. The business leader has to weigh *political* consequences against the business outcome. It's not exactly that people will consciously make a bad decision to appease, but rather ideas that seem good on the surface but actually bad with introspection gets passed around because nobody wants to be the "bad guy" explaining why the idea isn't as great as it seems. It's funny how so many bad decisions are constructed under such an environment where people are "afraid" to provide candid criticisms unless they are absolutely sure and have ample evidence to back up. This is probably why design by committee sucks (at least in Western cultures).

As I write this, I suspect this "playing too nice" cultural problem could actually be even worse than the "deference to authority" problem (that Asians are stereotypically affected by). I wish I could say "we need to empower people to say 'this doesn't work and here's why I believe so' ", but I guess I'm not in a position to say anything at all... The only takeaway, I guess, is this "problem" is probably a powerful conceptual tool to predict the evolution of societies, and how well-established entities and institutions eventually get to make dumb and stupid decisions one after another.