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Kool-aiding and Dog-fooding

Fun post about the difference between drinking your own Kool-aid and eating your own dog-food.
..if the business is actual dog food, then dogfooding it would be feeding the product to your own dogs, not eating it for lunch.

.. The point is that drinking your own Kool-aid is not the same as eating your own dogfood. If you’re drinking your own Kool-aid, you’re either suicidal or you believe your own hype.

It's been my experience that there is various degrees of suicidal in Kool-aid drinking. The least harmful is where the organization is glowing in self-congratulation and works as a mutual admiration society. It definitely builds camaraderie. But nay-sayers, malcontents and otherwise puzzled outsiders do not feel welcome and their ideas are summarily rejected. 

Such an organization may still continue to serve it's customers well - specially if they have been smart enough to get them to drink that same Kool-aid. Most harmful is when people are faking their enthusiasm for the Kool-aid while internally repelled by it. They do it to please the powers that be, protect their jobs and get their bonuses. This is more like the Emperor's New Clothes situation where no one is willing to tell the boss that the Kool-aid truly sucks and they would sooner poke their eyes out than drink that shit. 

Dog-fooding can be a treacherous and slippery slope. If the organization is Kool-aiding to begin with, then their dog-food is presumed to be the panacea for all that ails mankind. There is no problem it cannot fix. But reality ends up being quite different. Those who failed to rise from the dead eating the dog-food are presumed low-energy, lacking in leadership, without strategic vision and so on. It is never ever the the fault of the dog-food. 

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