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NASA, Chickens, and Some
Coaching Practices of Extraordinary
Leaders
by Bob Sherwin, Chief Operating
Officer, The Zenger/Folkman Company
We’re all occasionally guilty of
overlooking the obvious. I
recently heard a tongue-in-cheek story that
illustrates that point.
Scientists at NASA needed to simulate the frequent
incidents of collisions with airborne fowl in order to
test the windshield strength of high performance
airliners, military jets, and the space shuttle. To do
that, they developed a gun built specifically to
launch dead chickens at such windshields in a test
environment, both at close range and high velocity.
British engineers heard about the gun and were eager
to test it on the new, high performance windshields
of their high speed trains. Arrangements were
made. But when the gun was fired in the initial test,
the engineers stood shocked as they watched the
very first chicken hurtle out of the barrel, crash into
the shatterproof windshield, smash it to smithereens,
crash through the control console, snap the
engineer's backrest in two and embed itself in the
rear wall of the cabin.
The horrified British engineers sent NASA the
disastrous results of the experiment, along with the
designs of the windshield, and begged the U.S.
scientists for suggestions.
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