“Be patient,” the
salesman said. “I’m only on my third point – I’ve got nine more to go.”
Can you think of
a better way to kill off a sale?
A radically
different example comes out of the Cold War between the United States and the
former Soviet Union.
It was in 1983, when
the two bitter adversaries had enormous nuclear armaments trained on each
other. A software glitch mistakenly sent
an alert to the Soviet duty officer, falsely warning that the U.S. had launched
five missiles. There had been no such launch.
The Soviet
officer decided any real attack would be a lot more serious, so he withheld any
counterattack. Had he acted, there could have been nuclear war.
We project
managers can relate to the student sales example; not so the missile one. But
one factor in both illustrates a major point for us: the judgment of the
decision-maker.
