{"id":1010,"date":"2016-11-28T09:44:58","date_gmt":"2016-11-28T17:44:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/?p=1010"},"modified":"2016-11-28T09:44:58","modified_gmt":"2016-11-28T17:44:58","slug":"watch-out-for-the-hippo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/watch-out-for-the-hippo\/","title":{"rendered":"Watch out for the HiPPO"},"content":{"rendered":"

Way back in 2008 when I wrote chapter three of HWTSAM, I briefly mentioned the HiPPO in the context of ship room (war room) meeting structure:<\/p>\n

\n

Everyone’s voice is important. A phrase heard in many war rooms is “Don’t listen to the HiPPO”\u2014where HiPPO is an acronym for highest-paid person’s opinion.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It was a term I came across, but could not find attribution. I discovered fairly recently that Ronny Kohavi (whom I\u2019ve stolen  \/ borrowed from liberally when discussing A\/B testing and experimentation) who came up with the term in 2006<\/a>. <\/p>\n

My old colleague Seth Eliot also discussed the HiPPO in a blog post in a post last year<\/a>.<\/p>\n

While many organizational leaders aspire to become the next Steve Jobs, just about all of them will fail (as an aside, I was in a meeting once where a very senior person said that they made a critical decision, because \u201cit\u2019s what Steve Jobs would do, , and I\u2019m like Steve Jobs\u201d). What I\u2019ve discovered is that no matter how strongly someone feels<\/em> they \u201cknow what\u2019s best for the customer\u201d, without data, they\u2019re almost always wrong.<\/p>\n

It can be a big step to use data over organizational rank to make decisions, but if you care about pleasing your customers, the choice is obvious.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Way back in 2008 when I wrote chapter three of HWTSAM, I briefly mentioned the HiPPO in the context of ship room (war room) meeting structure: Everyone’s voice is important. A phrase heard in many war rooms is “Don’t listen to the HiPPO”\u2014where HiPPO is an acronym for highest-paid person’s opinion. It was a term…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1010"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1010\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}