I have found most bosses to be pretty damn dense, mostly interested in making sparkling reports to THEIR boss. In fact, I rated them by how fast they stole my ideas. The ideas weren't so brilliant, so I was glad to let go of them, as long as they got a life somehow.
The sharpest bosses (rare) would steal them with a week. One took about 6 years, and got them wrong. A couple of us were and are real open source junkies and argued that instead of screen-scraping various Learning Management Systems, (LMS) all of which had proprietary databases to lock school systems into their software with no possibility of export, that we give away a database schema for all schools use open source, and sell the software around it in a competitive marketplace.
It's called giving customers choice. Nahhhhhhhhhh.
He later scrawled a big brainstorm map on a board, mentioning the open source LMS, Sakai [0] Showing his deep understanding of open source, he spelled it "Sockeye".
I read tech magazines and one issue of "Fast Company" (2005) was on my desktop. When the boss entered the office for who knows what, he couldn't get his eyes off the magazine cover. It was a picture of Mr. Burns from The Simpsons with a feature article "Is Your Boss a Psychopath?" [1] I would have gotten the magazine without it, but (surprise) he aced the quiz inside.
I'm not making this up. [2] Image hosted at x02.me
Conclusion: Try to outsmart management. It's easy. I did it many times. I'll share some later on.
Cheers.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20050709032131/http://www.fastco...
