Welcome to Hell, kid.

I was a senior manager, for much of my career, and had about a 30% hit rate, with folks listening to me. My employees had to listen to me, but I actually encouraged them to talk back, if they had issues with my direction.

My bosses and peers?

...not so much...

This was especially true of the Japanese (I worked for a Japanese company). Even though I had a pretty significant level of influence (for a Westerner), I still had to beg for folks to listen to me.

My favorite, was when my team was assigned to help a Silicon Valley startup that my company had made a deal with, after the ink was dry on the contract.

There were a lot of problems with that relationship. Most of them, were because the senior Japanese management had made some really big mistakes; chiefly because of cultural differences between the companies (the startup was actually really good, but they were a fairly typical "smoke and mirrors" Silicon Valley startup, and had a different approach to pitching that didn't work well with the Japanese. Neither side really understood the other).

We did our best, but our hands were tied. It did not end well, which was pretty disastrous.

If someone had asked me to help out, before they signed the contract, it would have been a much better outcome. I'm no captain of industry, but the problems were pretty glaring and obvious, even to us mensches in the trenches.

> I think I never read as much in my life as during the month between announcing I was leaving my previous job and joining mytaxi.

I liked reading that. I would love folks to do that kind of thing, more often.