First Step Marketing

After passing muster, all successful applicants were subjected to the most exacting physical and psychological tests. Tests of physical endurance—how long can you support a column of mercury with one lungful of breath? Tests of mental stability—how long can you endure being locked up in a pitch-black, soundproof “sensory deprivation chamber” with no idea when you will be released? Tests of pain suppression—if we drive a long needle into the big muscle at the base of your thumb and pass an electric current through it, what will you do?

Eventually the general found his seven men.

He found Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, Gordon Cooper, and Deke Slayton. He found the seven astronauts of the Mercury Space Program.

And like any good manager, after having found them, he trained them. They were taught everything from the esoterics of gravitation and rocket propulsion to the very practical matter of how to control yaw, roll, and pitch in the vacuum of space. They were given the best teachers, the most up-to-date equipment, and the time to focus. Over two years they acquired a wealth of new skills and knowledge.

Alan Shepard’s fifteen-minute suborbital flight was the first of six successful missions (Deke Slayton fell foul of a preexisting heart condition), which culminated in Gordon Cooper’s thirty-four-hour, twenty-two-orbit marathon.

By the time Cooper splashed down, the Russians had been caught up with, America’s pride had been restored, and the platform had been laid for the leap to the moon.

From almost every angle, the MISS program (Man in Space Soonest) was a model of project execution excellence: superior technology combined with carefully selected and well-trained employees, all focused on a specific mission and buoyed by the hopes of a nation. No wonder it _succeeded.

But look closer. When you examine the Mercury Program through a strictly managerial lens, you do not see a picture-perfect project. You see six very different missions. And putting aside for a moment the _spectacular dimension of the endeavor and the inspirational bravery of each astronaut, the quality of the performance in each of the six missions can be comparatively ranked—two textbook, two heroic, and two mediocre. Look closer still and you realize that, in most instances, the individual astronauts themselves caused this variation.

Alan Shepard and Wally Schirra, both career military men, executed their duties perfectly: no drama, no surprises, textbook missions.

John Glenn and Gordon Cooper were a little special. Glenn was the heroes’ hero. Cooper was so laid-back, he actually fell asleep on the launchpad. But both of them faced severe mechanical difficulties and then responded with cool heroism and technical brilliance—Cooper even managed to achieve the most accurate splashdown of all, despite the complete failure of his automatic reentry guidance systems.

The performances of Gus Grissom and Scott Carpenter were rather less impressive. Grissom piloted a clean flight, but he appeared to panic after his capsule splashed down. It seems he blew the escape hatch too early, the capsule filled with water, and it sank to the sea floor sixteen thousand feet below. NASA never recovered the three-thousand-pound capsule.

Carpenter, meanwhile, was so excited to be up in space that while in orbit he maneuvered his capsule this way and that until he had used up almost all his fuel. When it came time to reenter the earth’s atmosphere, he was unable to make the appropriate corrections to his angle of reentry and ended up splashing down 250 miles from his designated landing sight. He was lucky. If he had been a couple of degrees shallower in his approach, the capsule would have bounced off the atmosphere and spun off into space for eternity.

NASA must have looked at the performance of their astronauts and wondered, “Why this range in performance? We selected for experience, for intelligence, and for determination. They all had the same training and the same tools. So why didn’t they perform the same? Why did Cooper excel while Carpenter struggled? Why did Glenn behave so calmly and Grissom less so?”

The answer is that despite being similar in many ways—and all exceptionally accomplished, in comparison with the rest of us—these six men possessed different talents.

What does that mean? It means that although each of these men faced the same stimuli, the way they reacted to these stimuli and then behaved was very different. During orbit, Carpenter was so excited that he couldn’t stop playing with the altitude jets; yet Cooper felt so calm, he actually slept through some of his orbits. At takeoff, Grissom’s pulse rate spurted to 150. Glenn’s never climbed above 80.

Same stimuli, vastly different reactions. Why? Because each man filtered the world differently. Each man’s mental filter sorted and sifted, making one man acutely aware of stimuli to which another was blind. Bobbing in the water after splashdown, the dependable Wally Schirra was so focused on “doing it right” that he stayed in the capsule for four hours in order to complete every step of his postflight routine. His mental filter blocked out any twinges of claustrophobia. Gus Grissom’s didn’t. All indications are that barely five minutes after splashing down, he felt the tiny little capsule closing in around him. His mental filter, no longer able to dampen his growing panic, told him to get out, to escape, now, now. The hatch blew.

You have a filter, a characteristic way of responding to the world around you. We all do. Your filter tells you which stimuli to notice and which to ignore; which to love and which to hate. It creates your innate motivations—are you competitive, altruistic, or ego driven? It defines how you think—are you disciplined or laissez-faire, practical or strategic? It forges your prevailing attitudes—are you optimistic or cynical, calm or anxious, empathetic or cold? It creates in you all of your distinct patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior. In effect, your filter is the source of your talents.

Your filter is unique. It sorts through every stimulus and creates a world that only you can see. This filter can account for the fact that the same stimulus produces vastly different reactions in you from those in the person next to you.

For example, imagine you are asleep on a long flight when the plane encounters some high-level turbulence. Do you wake up, convinced that the main reason you haven’t heard any explanation from the cockpit is that the pilots are too busy strapping on their parachutes? Or do you stay sleeping, a slightly more vigorous head nodding the only sign that your body notices the bumps?

Imagine you are at a party with some people you know and some you don’t. Do you find yourself compelled to dive into the crowd of strangers and swim easily through the throng, remembering names, telling stories, turning strangers into friends? Or do you hug the corner with your significant other, scanning the room for anyone else you might know and nervously rehearsing the one joke you might have to tell tonight?

Imagine you are arguing with your boss. As the argument intensifies, do you find yourself becoming colder, clearer, more articulate, as your brain hands you one perfect word after another? Or, despite all your preparations, does your emotion rise and your brain shut down, separating you from all of those carefully rehearsed words?

Because every human being is guided by his unique filter, the same situation produces very different reactions. What is ridiculously easy for him is excruciatingly difficult for you. What is stimulating to you is tedious for someone else.

All truck drivers face the same situation—miles of road, an unwieldy load, and swarms of little cars buzzing around them. They all have the same training, the same experience. But some of these drivers drive twice as many miles as their colleagues yet suffer half as many accidents. Why? Their filter. When you ask the best drivers, “What do you think about when you are driving?” they all say the same thing. They all say, “I think about what would I do if. . . if that car pulled out right now. If that pedestrian decided to try to cross before the light changed. If my brakes failed.” While the other drivers are thinking about the next rest stop, how much longer they have to go today, or other, more diverting subjects, the best drivers are playing “what if?” games, anticipating scenarios, planning evasive maneuvers. Same stimuli, different reactions, very different performance.

Likewise all customer service representatives face the same situation—thousands of telephone calls coming in from disgruntled customers. They all have the same technology, the same experience and training. Yet the best take a third fewer calls than the average to solve the same complaint. Why? Because for the best, many of whom are shy in person, the phone is an instrument of intimacy. It offers them shelter from the customer while at the same time giving them the chance to reach through the phone and connect more quickly and more closely than if they were standing face-to-face with her. They picture what room the customer is in. They imagine what the customer looks like. They smile and wave their hands even though they know that the customer cannot see what they are doing. Instinctively their filter takes every disembodied voice and fashions a full human being. On the other end of the line, the customer feels the difference.

This filtering of their world is not a conscious, rational process. It does not happen once a week, allowing them the luxury of sitting back and weighing up all alternatives before deciding on the most “sensible” course of action. Rather, their filter is constantly at work, sorting, sifting, creating their world in real time.

Maybe you are speed-reading this so that you can get to the end before your plane flight ends. Maybe the flight has nothing to do with it; you are simply a compulsive speed reader. Maybe you have just picked up your pen to underline this paragraph or to make a scrawled note in the margin.

Your filter is always working. Of all the possibilities of things you could do or feel or think, your filter is constantly telling you the few things you must do or feel or think.

Your filter, more than your race, sex, age, or nationality, is You.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 at 8:03 pm and is filed under Business Management, Career Management, Customer Service, Jobs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.