alt Hacker NewsComplete aside: I was reading about Jeff Bezos, who famously instituted required pre-reading at every meeting. That is, the meeting presenter prepared a 1-2 page paper on the context, goals, and proposed outcome of each meeting.
Bezos has a sharp mind and often got impatient with the paper for not getting to the point quickly enough. He would deal with the boredom by highlighting all the mistaken assumptions and errors in the paper, which would often derail the meeting.
One VP came up with a way to deal with that. His advice was to write the paper as if the reader was an expert in the field--no definitions, no preamble, just assume the reader already knows.
Then remove every other paragraph.
The result was a paper that forced Bezos to focus and think about every sentence just to understand it. That made it easier to get his agreement at the end.
Distract them by withholding information, so you feel like more of an expert than they are, and they don't have enough concrete info to form an attack plan.
An effective strategy for lots of higher tier management. For both good and bad reasons - often they don't want the details, they want to know that you know the details. You're being paid to know those details, after all.