Back in the late 70's I worked for Hewlett Packard in Loveland Colorado as an R&D section manager. We were under the aegis of Executive VP Paul Ely. He was a brilliant, driving, abrasive manager. No one knew what would happen when he visited our Division, but we all knew we would be asked tough questions and some heads would probably roll.
At a time management seminar I attended, we were to think of some long term goals we would like to achieve. One I wrote down was to "one-up" Paul Ely. Pure fantasy, because I was no match in intelligence, wit, or power.
Time passed. Once a year, we had a division review, where all the top executives would come to review the progress of the products we were developing. At this particular review, I was chosen to give the pitch about the computer we were developing for the market.
Paul Ely was in the group as I started my pitch. He always put me on edge.
Part of my presentation was to show how much faster our prototype was than other products on the market. I had three competitor's products to compare our computer against. I started the first computer which computed a complex problem. It took fifteen seconds. I used a stopwatch to catch the time.
I did the same for the other computers. Each was computing the same problem. Finally, I tested our computer and bragged that it had solved the problem in less than a second.
After I gave the result, Paul jokingly said to the crowd, "It looks like he has a quick thumb," meaning that I had fudged the results.
[Now you must know that I actually am missing the first knuckle of my thumb that was on the stopwatch. I lost it when I was nine from a dynamite cap explosion.]
Serendipity. I raised up my thumb and said, "It's a birth defect."
Wild and crazy laughter. Everyone was ribbing Ely. Non of the execs were dismayed to see their irritating counterpart embarrassed and piled on.
I crossed "one-up Paul Ely" off my life list. It was an incredible bit of luck and uncontrolled bit of quick thinking. I could not have achieved my goal any other way.
