Building Consensus
One of the core skills of a Program Manager is to build consensus. Microsoft (like many knowledge-worker driven IT companies) is not a top-down organization. For the most part, projects, ideas, directions are taken on through a consensus building exercise at one level or another. While this can be frustrating and slow at times, it does a very effective job at weeding out bad ideas and honing good ones. So how do you go about getting an idea to stick? Because Microsoft is an organization of people, it is more than push-a-button-get-an-answer. You have to work with and through people with all their wonderful idiosyncrasies, creativity, passions, hopes and fears. As a PM, you are often asked to build consensus with folks that are much more senior
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Read the complete post at http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2006/12/21/building-consensus.aspx