Crankiness is a sure-fire motivator for writing a punchy, sarcastic column. The downside: It doesn’t always lead to the most tactful recommendations.

David Carlson wrote to suggest, gently, that my final recommendation for responding to someone who tells you to face reality wasn’t particularly useful.

He’s right, too. While not as sarcastic as “Here on earth,” my suggested, “We have to decide whether to face reality or face facts, because so far as I know the evidence suggests otherwise,” is hardly a model of businesslike comportment.

Fun, though.

Before exploring other alternatives, there’s a larger point to make, so important that I’ve coined an acronym for it: ROT. That stands for Relationships Outlive Transactions. If you want to succeed as a business executive, make ROT a way of life.

It isn’t uncommon for IT staffers, who otherwise care passionately about the quality of engineering in their work products, to get the capitalization wrong. Faced with a design compromise insisted on by management that’s clearly second-rate engineering, some systems analysts will complain to their colleagues about politics intruding on IT design decisions. “What a bunch of rot!” they’ll exclaim, when they should comment, more understandingly, “What a bunch of ROT.”

Relationships are defined by mutual knowledge of each others’ subtleties of motivation, definitions of integrity, congruence of goals, and overall chemistry. Relationships create trust and an ability to cooperate. They lubricate the conduct of day-to-day business. Relationships outlive transactions — the individual decisions and compromises that go into the won and lost columns of life.

It’s rare that winning a single transaction is worth causing a good working relationship to decay, although it can happen. That’s why an ability to compromise is so important in the executive suite: Without it, an executive will, in winning one battle, use tactics that alienate peers to the extent they’ll be on the other side of all subsequent battles.

At IT Catalysts our business change management consulting methodology starts with a stakeholder analysis — an attempt to determine who is likely to resist whatever change is being planned, why, and what to do about it. Among the more common strategies for dealing with change resisters are firing them, marginalizing them, and co-opting them. Of these three, co-option is, when possible, the superior alternative, for two reasons. The first is that apostasy is powerfully persuasive for everyone else. For those who also have opposed whatever it is, a public apostate makes it okay for them to change their minds as well if they’re at all tempted to do so. It helps mold opinion as you want it shaped.

The other reason, relevant to the subject of reality and who owns it, is that when you co-opt a resister you build or strengthen a working relationship, turning an opponent on one issue into a likely ally on the next issue.

How does this fit the subject? Imagine you’re on the receiving end of another executive saying you have to face reality. If you respond as I’d suggested in the last column, you might win your point, but you’ll do so by publicly embarrassing your opponent. That fosters resentment, which can fester, coming back to haunt you next time the two of you are at odds.

That isn’t always a bad thing. If the individual in question already has you in the cross-hairs and has decided you’re going to be an opponent, your only two choices are to win or to lose. As a general rule, winning is better.

But if the other person is also a ROTter (or can be turned into one), you’re far better off choosing a course of action designed to win everyone over, including Mr. or Ms. Reality.

Which might mean nothing more than ignoring the offending phrase entirely, responding, “I just don’t see it that way. Here’s why.”

Or, you can play the apostasy card yourself: “I used to think that myself. Then I read a book by Bob Lewis, and I became convinced that this other way of looking at the situation works better.” (Your having helped me sell more books is just a fringe benefit.)

The apostasy gambit is just as persuasive when you’re the apostate as when you co-opt an opponent. Even better, it promotes your goal of making the whole ROTten company work better.

In May of 1996 my InfoWorld column, then called the IS Survival Guide, introduced the technology life cycle: Hype, disillusionment, application. Several years later, Gartner introduced its highly similar “Technology Adoption Curve,” without, I’m sure, any knowledge of my prior art. Needless to say, the Gartner model is the one that’s cited incessantly in the business and IT trade press.

But am I bitter? Nah. Why would I be bitter, just because they get all the credit (and more important, revenue) for an idea I published first?

I’m not bitter, and I’m hurt you’d think I’m so small that I’d feel that way. I am, however, sore from the strain of patting myself on the back, because in what I laughingly call my spare time I’ve been adding columns to the KJR archives on www.issurvivor.com. There’s some good stuff in there, if I do say so myself — ideas that if not original were at least far ahead of their time.

Since this is the start of my ninth year writing these things, I’m in the mood for nostalgia. In that vein, here’s my personal top five list. Next week I’ll stop bragging and get back to work.

#1: The fallacy of internal customers: If I had to pick the single accomplishment of which I’m most proud, it’s the part my column has played in eliminating this sorry notion. I first mentioned the issue in a guest editorial published in InfoWorld in 1994. My opinion hasn’t changed, although it has, I hope, become a bit more sophisticated.

#2: There’s no such thing as an IT project: As far as I can tell, my first commentary along these lines appeared in 1998, and columns ever since have made the crucial point — that it’s always about changing the business or there’s no point to the effort. In the recent debate over Nicholas Carr’s Harvard Business Review article “IT Doesn’t Matter,” this concept assumed center stage among those of us who have replied, “Don’t be ridiculous.”

#3: Debunking bad measures: I first criticized Gartner’s TCO model, then called the “PC Cost/Benefit and Payback Analysis,” in 1993 in my first guest editorial in InfoWorld. The logic stands up well today despite a decade of Gartner’s refining the model, probably because refinement isn’t what’s needed — the model’s problems are basic and fundamental. And while Erik Brynjolfsson is the most influential critic of another example of bad measures — the so-called “productivity paradox” — I got there early (1996) and can at least claim credit as having irritated Paul Strassmann the most for my critique of his assertion in The Squandered Computer that investments in IT don’t pay off. What’s important in this debate isn’t my ongoing desire to say, “I told you so.” It’s the importance, and the difficulty of establishing well-constructed value-based measures of information technology.

#4: The fallacy of big projects: I recall reading, in the early 1990s, about a decision made by UPS to reject any project more than nine months long. I was very impressed, and started writing about “chunking” big projects into collections of small ones starting in 1996. The notion has since become mainstream, I’m delighted to say.

#5: The Value Prevention Society: The underlying idea of this satire — that it’s worthwhile preserving flexibility for end-users so they can continue finding innovative uses for their personal computers — never did catch on. Perhaps I’m tilting at windmills, but I still think locking down every desktop and preventing end-users from developing their own applications is a bad idea.

Honorable mentions go to a few other notions published early: Marketing yourself as a product (preceding Tom Peter’s notion of personal brand by at least three years); the importance of technical sophistication, along with business acumen, for a CIO (years before the CTO title was first coined); predicting the failure of the Network Computer (as soon as Larry Ellison first mentioned the idea); and the importance of IT’s figuring out how to work with the marketing department (1996, long before this became an industry discussion point).

If you’re feeling nostalgic as well, you can find the first four years of my weekly columns, along with the three Peer to Peer columns that started my publishing relationship with InfoWorld, and every Keep the Joint Running in the KJR archives on www.issurvivor.com. My New Year’s resolution is to get the rest of the archives loaded.

With luck I’ll be more successful with this than I was with last year’s resolution to use the treadmill several times each week.