[xk_id]

> Who really believes this crap?

You'd be surprised who believes and applies it. I'm doing a university degree that is supposedly a combination between CS and business/management. For some reason, however, 99% of the students enrolled are heartbreakingly disconnected from anything CS; most of them hope to become management consultants. I've worked with those people in group projects, and trust me, they are exactly the kind of techniques junkies, who sacrifice all humane common sense [1] and become this sort of compulsive manipulators who keep tailoring their attitude towards the team to the point where it stops making any effin sense whatsoever. I am starting to think the reason why those techniques end up actually working is because they appear so convoluted and ridiculous from the outside that you're just going to comply out of confusion. Or maybe it's out of pitty.

[1] If we are to be rigorous, then "common sense" is just another technique, learned and applied. There's nothing sacred about it, so if it necessary it should be replaced with a more effective "sense". However, what I tried to emphasize is that the techniques like the ones in the article are very, very buggy.