It’s interesting to consider which professions obsess over lineages, John Psmith says:
For instance an academic philosopher and a Brazilian Ju-Jitsu fighter may not have much in common, but they can both tell you not just who their teacher-mentor was, but who that guy’s teacher-mentor was, and so on, sometimes going back centuries.1 This is not true in most fields, but you may be surprised to learn that it is true in B2B enterprise software sales. Talk to a successful sales guy, and he will find a way to slip into the conversation that he came up under so-and-so, and that so-and-so worked for the legendary Mark Cranney (Ben Horowitz’s head of sales). But talk to enough of them, and you will start to notice that a huge proportion of their lineages all converge back on a single guy named John McMahon.
You may never have heard of John McMahon, but he’s one of the most influential people alive today (there are many such people, because the world is fractally interesting). American economic growth is increasingly dominated by a handful of companies that sell software subscriptions at eye-watering margins to other large companies, and most such companies are run by John McMahon’s disciples. All enterprise software sellers today speak a common vocabulary, and that vocabulary was invented by John McMahon. Enterprise software sellers, like all professions, have weird feuds and religious disputes about what exactly the letters in various acronyms should stand for, but the acronyms were invented by John McMahon. The rival factions and schools in enterprise software sales mostly argue about the correct way to interpret John McMahon’s thought, because he is the great teacher and systematizer who laid down the laws of their world.
The reason certain fields care about lineages is that they are dominated by process knowledge that cannot be written down, so the best signal of quality is not some credential, but rather which master you trained under. Imagine how silly it would be to think that you could read a book about martial arts, and then you would know as much as the person who had written it. Some things can only be learned through grueling practice, preferably grueling practice under the observation of somebody who notices all the tiny little indescribable things you get wrong, and shows you how to do them right instead.
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Selling software (really, selling anything) is another such activity. And while John McMahon is the guy who has done the most to change it from an art into a science, he is acutely aware that nothing he writes down in a book can help you unless you already understand the thing that he is trying to say. So like all good religious teachers, he speaks mostly in koans and riddles and parables. It worked for the Zen masters, it worked for Nietzsche, it worked for Jesus Christ, so why wouldn’t it work for John McMahon? The whole book is an extended allegory in which John McMahon is called in to advise a failing software sales team, notices the defects in their technique, and says or does something, at which point they are enlightened.
(Hat tip to Byrne Hobart.)