Reflections on Palantir – Nabeel S. Qureshi

Being a successful FDE required an unusual sensitivity to social context – what you really had to do was partner with your corporate (or government) counterparts at the highest level and gain their trust, which often required playing political games. Impro is popular with nerds partly because it breaks down social behavior mechanistically. The vocabulary of the company was saturated with Impro-isms – ‘casting’ is an example. Johnstone discusses how the same actor can play ‘high status’ or ‘low status’ just by changing parts of their physical behavior – for example, keeping your head still while talking is high status, whereas moving your head side to side a lot is low status. Standing tall with your hands showing is high status, slouching with your hands in your pocket is low status. And so on. If you didn’t know all this, you were unlikely to succeed in a customer environment. Which meant you were unlikely to integrate customer data or get people to use your software. Which meant failure.
— Read on nabeelqu.substack.com/p/reflections-on-palantir