He had a stammer and could not argue in person, so he wrote. His essays reached the king of Qin, who read them and said that if he could meet this man he would die content, then invaded Han to get him. At the Qin court Han Fei was undone by a fellow student from his own teacher's school, Li Si, who was jealous of him and spoke against him; he was imprisoned and forced to take poison. The man who wrote the definitive analysis of persuasion and court intrigue was killed by a piece of court intrigue. Knowing and being able to do it are not the same faculty.
Law, method and position together
Law is the written rule everyone is held to; method is how you assess and check the people below you; position is the authority the seat itself carries. Missing the first, the rules get bypassed. Missing the second, you get compliance in form only. Missing the third, nobody listens.
The policy exists, nobody checks it, and the person enforcing it has no standing to say no. Any one of the three missing and the other two stop working.
People follow interest, not exhortation
He doesn't believe in natural loyalty; he believes in incentives. Design the system well and people behave the way you wanted. It is Munger's 'show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome', stated twenty-two centuries earlier.
The all-hands asked everyone to prioritise quality. Bonuses stayed tied to shipped count. Everyone shipped.
The difficulty of persuasion
The hard part of speaking, he wrote, is not what you know but working out what the listener actually cares about. He catalogued the fatal errors — exposing what they don't want exposed, speaking at the wrong moment, being too direct — and then died of one.
Your deck answered whether it could be built. The one person who could approve it was worried about who gets blamed if it fails.
How do I use it today?
When designing incentives for a team, ask what this system will make people do, not what it ought to make them do. People act on interest. Aligning what you want with what pays is the whole of the job.
