CEOs are people, too. Sometimes they forget. Sometimes they think that, because everyone looks to them for answers, that they must indeed have all the answers.

I once worked in a company that had a whole Documentation team, chock full of great and talented people. And they developed a comprehensive set of smart and carefully-chosen standards in an effort to maintain consistency across a large portfolio of applications.

The CEO, however, arbitrarily decided that all OK/Cancel button sets should be labeled … “OK” and “Cancel”. And the buttons should be identical to each other. (Naturally, I disagree.)

Didn’t matter what a page or task flow was supposed to do, or what “OK” meant in one case, or what “Cancel” meant in another. All that mattered was that he had a definitive answer on how they should be labeled.

So, this team spent all their time crafting wonderful and informative Help documentation to answer questions about how to use the features within the application. But if the button labels had been more meaningful, the articles could have been shorter. They could have been needed by fewer people.

In other words, the CEO was paying the Documentation team to help users work around his bad decisions.

You can have a team of 100 great copywriters, but if you also have a “Control Freak in Charge” (CFIC), it won’t make an iota of difference. First, you have to sell the CFIC on intelligent decisions. And that can be tricky business.

So, how do you talk a CFIC out of a bad idea and into a good one?

I get this question a lot. Share your stories. Let’s help each other.

Posted by Robert on June 19th, 2008