The question of keeping spare PCs on the shelf, which I mentioned in a recent post ("Budgeting when there aren't any budgets,") Advice Line 10/31/2006) seems to be more controversial than I'd expected. Especially, some readers expressed concern that they'd be chewed out by the CEO for having them.This brings up the issue of persuasion - how do you present your decisions in ways most likely to get them accepted. The question of keeping spare PCs on the shelf, which I mentioned in a recent post (“Budgeting when there aren’t any budgets,”) Advice Line 10/31/2006) seems to be more controversial than I’d expected. Especially, some readers expressed concern that they’d be chewed out by the CEO for having them.This brings up the issue of persuasion – how do you present your decisions in ways most likely to get them accepted. There’s no magic formula for this. There are some guidelines, though. Two are: (1) Always work within your audiences’ experiential framework, not your own; and (2) explanations that are simple and direct work better than those that are complex and subtle.Here, these guidelines lead to a simple solution: Include the spares in your business continuity plan. Business continuity plans aren’t always about losing an entire building and the surrounding city block. They’re also about how to handle an unexpected snowstorm. And the loss of a single PC or server.If you include your spares in your business continuity plan you’ll find they turn into a rounding error that’s of no interest at all to your CEO, except to the extent that they identify you as a pragmatist who knows how to deal with real-world situations in a practical way.– Bob Technology Industry