How to Win Arguments and Manipulate Managers

In a company, being right isn't enough—you need to know how to sell your ideas, especially to those at the top. Evan Armstrong learned this lesson the hard way. This piece from last fall chronicles his evolution from frustrated analyst to successful persuader, using a real-world example from Every. Evan breaks down his approach into three strategies: weaving compelling narratives, understanding the psychology of decision-makers, and preparing for objections with "gotcha slides." Let us know what has worked for you in the comments.—Kate Lee

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Everyone has a boss, and God, in his infinite appetite for cruelty, will almost certainly ensure that said individual is a dumbass. Maybe you spit on an Indian burial site and got cursed. Maybe low IQ is a prerequisite for VP titles or board seats. Who knows. Regardless, you are going to have to learn to deal with people more powerful than you. So learning how to navigate an organization is one of the most important skills for a career. Yes, it is trite and bleak and horrible, but I would prefer a colleague who can get the VP to agree with what our team wants over any other capability.

The need for this skill is especially acute for those of us who do analysis for a living. Whether you are tasked to build a financial model, a dashboard on user data, or a flowchart of workflows, if you are semi-regularly asked, “Can you figure that out?” this guide is for you.

These are hard-won lessons. Frankly, for most of my career I was atrocious at this. My analysis has always been good, but I sucked at translating the spreadsheets into company change. I (foolishly) thought that “data would prevail” or “management will do what the math says we should.”

But what data is, or what “right” even means, can be strongly skewed by incentives or bias. Even though most firms should base their decisions on analytical rigor and risk-adjusted investment, they end up doing so based on hubris.

So, after nearly a decade of doing this wrong, please learn from my mistakes. These skills should be used for good (improving the company’s chance of success) but are also applicable in a more Machievellian sense, if that’s your sort of thing. To make this feel more real, I’m going to walk you through a work of analysis I did here at Every. Using it as a framing device, I’ll share three ways to use narratives, psychology, and gotcha slides to win at work.

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