Promise And Deliver

Promise and Deliver

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the FTB.com motivational series: Putting the ‘B’ into FTB – motivation and me!

Today we are going to look at the age old proverb: That you should always under promise, and over deliver.

In other words, you should exceed the customers expectations. Do what you know you can do. Keep everyone happy. This is shit advice!

But FTB, we were always told this since we were very young…?

In the real world, or the IT world – especially in big corporations – almost the opposite is true. It is advantageous to over promise – and people who do, tend to get to the top quicker. Why is that you ask?

Contracts. In a business, you are always competing for a contract of some sort (new project at work, being noticed in the team, a sale to a customer) and the guy who promises the most bang for buck wins. Plain and simple. If you over promise over your peers, you win the contract – and you have to be in to win. Now you would say that over promising can be dangerous – as the customer may never come back if you under deliver – and you would be right. But this generally tends to not be the case, as people understand that delays are a thing, problems come up.

Let’s take an example – in your car you’ve blown a tranny (not literally @Trandy!) and you take it to two mechanics for a quote. Both mechanics don’t know how to fix transmissions – and Mr Nice Guy “Mechanic A” says the truth, it might take a while. “Mechanic B” (our avid FTB.com readers) would say: “Fuck yes I know how to fix trannys. My mates one.”

In the end, Mechanic B gets the money, gets the car, and now needs to learn how to fix transmissions fuckin fast. And under pressure, people tend to perform. He gets the money, and gets the job done even though he didn’t know he could do it. Even if he couldn’t do it in time, too bad, I have the car and it may take a couple days longer.

Over delivering is pointless, bosses don’t appreciate it. They will just give you more work to do and won’t let you leave early.

This is nice, but what you really want to do is over promise and over deliver.

True greatness in history always comes from a person over promising. You don’t create something amazing by doing what you know. When IBM asked Bill Gates if DOS would be ready in the next week in the 90’s, he said ‘Yes it’s basically done’ – even though he hadn’t written a single line of code (true story).

Bill Gates said he’d be able to jump this chair – he never had jumped before

I promise you guys amazing, well thought out IT journalism and by god I keep just going that extra mile. That’s why this blog is as big as it is.

Remember, life is easier the lower you keep everyone’s expectations. Until the next one!

Posted on December 10, 2019