Comment by ImPostingOnHN
7 months ago
Combative in this case means treating the exchange as combat: a fight to win; rather than an opportunity to be humble and listen to others and learn.
The exchanges all read like Vlad derives a lot of self-esteem from being right, which isn't as good as deriving it from ability to learn when wrong.
Wouldn’t the same apply to Lori in that exchange. They just put the company on blast and aren’t willing to even hear the other side of things. That email exchange made me lose a ton of respect for them.
But, Vlad definitely should have stopped when Lori responded that they didn’t want to have a conversation at all. If for no other reason than they were a lost cause.
The one who "needs to hear the other side of things" is rarely the customer, and this is a good case study in why: no matter how much this customer "hears", they are right and Vlad is wrong with regards to the GDPR. By insisting that the customer needed to "hear the other (wrong) side of things" he looked worse than if he had just listened to the customer.
The customer isn't always right, but often is, like in this case. If you're a CEO, best to just pipe down, be humble, and listen to customers. Being open to being wrong is a nice plus, but either way, people will like you more if you appear to listen instead of argue. Even when you're right!
tl;dr: this isn't an internet argument between two otherwise-equal random strangers, this is a CEO talking down to a customer while being objectively wrong, which is 2x bad.
The problem is that Vlad seems objectively wrong about his interpretation of the GDPR and what is and is not PII. (I mean, jesus, "email address isn't PII because you can use a burner"? What, no, that's not how it works).
Instead of actually educating himself, he just argues that he's not wrong. I could easily see Lori being sick of the frustration of having to deal with that and just say "ok, nope, this conversation is done".
> They just put the company on blast and aren’t willing to even hear the other side of things.
I don't think that's what actually happened?