 |
- Select victims from countries where
submission to authority is ingrained at an early age.
- Claim credit for influence that you did
not have – “I am so pleased that your paper was accepted – I had
to fight really hard for that one”. The beauty of this strategy
resides in its unfalsifiability. It also works for letters of
reference, especially if you have actually tried to prevent the
candidate from obtaining the job.
- The time-honoured
approach is obligation through funding. You should "fund
at the margin": Providing the last 5% of funding to
enable the obligatee to achieve their goal provides you
with a 20:1 leverage on your investment.
- Pick potential obligatees by keeping your
ears open to troubles and laments. For example, a student whose
scholarship is about to run out, but has almost finished their
thesis, can be put into a position of life-time obligation for
the small investment of three months stipend. A side condition
will be co-authorship of all the papers arising from the
previous work as well as the work to be done.
- The above strategy can be combined with
project management damage control techniques by offering the
future obligatee the once in a
lifetime opportunity to take over the lead on a project that is
tanking badly. That way when the project does fail, you look
clean, and the obligatee will mix shame and embarrassment in
with the obligation to create a powerful toxic mix of emotional
instability.
|
