Every engineer has been there: you present a technically airtight proposal, complete with benchmarks and diagrams, only to watch it die in committee. Perelman's The new rhetoric draws the crucial distinction between convincing and persuading that most technical teams miss entirely. Convincing works on logic; persuading works on people.

Convincing addresses the "universal audience" - an idealized rational mind that doesn't exist in real organizations. You can prove microservices are superior to monoliths until you're blue in the face, but if the last migration attempt ended in disaster, your logic won't matter. Engineers worship logic and treat credibility and emotion as contamination, but human decision-making doesn't work that way.

This isn't manipulation - it's recognizing that human beings aren't compilers. The best technical leaders I've worked with aren't necessarily the smartest; they're the ones who learned that being right is the starting line, not the finish. Authority gets compliance, but persuasion gets commitment. That's why rewrites stall and migrations rot - not because the logic was wrong, but because no one felt moved to act on it.