In Praise of the Hail Mary Pass

Months of work crashed and burned in a three minute phone call.

“You have proposed the Turner Technologies solution,” said my customer. “We are not going to buy the Turner design.”

He cleared his throat, and I heard the phone line crackle in the silence. “You also represent the McFarland Industries product, right?”

I thought, What the heck. Why not?

After his opening line, all seemed lost anyway. I did not hesitate. There was a hollowness in the pit of my stomach.

“We do, yes,” I heard myself saying. “We support McFarland. But our survey of your needs, and the input from your working team, suggested Turner would be a much better fit.”

[To the reader: All these names have been changed; I have no desire to ruin careers.]

I took a deep breath, trying to let the stunned disbelief subside. We had invested four months in the pre-proposal needs assessment. The results were clear. Everyone — my team and the customer’s people — had been on board.

I realized he had begun speaking again. “And Turner probably would be better,” he admitted. There was hesitation in his voice, even from 300 miles away. “But we have run into… ahh…” his voice trailed off.

I let the pause run for a moment.

“Extenuating circumstances?” I ventured.

“You could say that,” he said. Then, stronger, he continued. “Turner simply will not work. I won’t go into details. The Board is in agreement. I am sorry to let you go down this road. I did not think it would come to this.”

He cleared his throat again, and I sensed genuine humility from him. “Your competitor has already proposed McFarland, and it appears that will be our direction.”

I tried to muster the grace to respond. I was not accustomed to losing.

A sudden thought occurred to me, like a tiny beam of light through a heavy forest canopy:

Why is he telling me this?

“Has the contract been signed?” A brutally direct question will sometimes derail a bad situation. This situation could use some derailing.

His pause told me what I needed to know, and I felt a sudden quickening. I could feel my pulse rate accelerate.

“There is a board meeting in two weeks,” he said. “They will award the contract then.”

Negotiating against the headwind

“So, that means –”

“That means you do not have a snowball’s chance,” he interrupted. “This is an enormous project. You have had four of your people on it constantly since the spring. You could not possibly construct a McFarland proposal for us in 14 days.”

“So, Bradley –” I had never used his first name before, but this seemed the time for it – “you’re telling me that if I bring you a McFarland proposal, at a comparable price, you will entertain that option?”

He spoke slowly. “I think we would be obligated to review it, given the terms of the Request for Proposal we released.”

“I agree,” I said. “That is the legal requirement written into your specs.”

There was an awkward silence. I was playing hardball, and he had not heard this from me before.

“Do you think you can construct a McFarland proposal in that timeframe?”

“I think the question is, if we do, will you give it an honest review?”

A small toe in a large door

Another pause, then a sudden decision. “If you are going to mobilize your people to do that, then I will assemble our team for a review. We would need 48 hours. That means…” I could hear him fumbling, a keyboard click-clacking. He was accessing a calendar, and in a moment gave me a date.

Barely 12 days, including the weekend. But I had already decided the answer.

“You will have it,” I said. “But to meet that timeframe, it will be delivered electronically. I can overnight the hardcopy to you, but you will not have it to begin the review.” I paused. “That violates the written requirements of the RFP. Will you extend a waiver?”

Never offer a concession without requiring something in return.

“I will email the waiver today. Good luck.” He rang off.

Facing the music

The sales team took it better than I had hoped. After the first stunned silence, the audio conference bridge erupted.

“So, we’re still in the game?”

“Clear the calendar for this weekend, right?”

“He really said they would review it honestly?”

“Did they lie to us about the needs assessment?”

And then, a clear voice of reason: “Why would he tell you that, unless he wanted us to win?”

I replied only to the last. “My thoughts exactly.”

We talked about other commitments the team members had, and how to delay or shuffle them off, creating time in a calendar where there was no time.

There was suddenly a new sense of purpose, and even excitement. Making a proposal as complex as this, and doing so in under two weeks, would probably be a once-in-a-career moment, and we all knew it.

I knew that most of them thought that hoping for a win at the end was no more than a distant dream.

Have I already said that I was not accustomed to losing?

The mechanics of making it happen

The following days, and most of the nights, were crammed with activity. The McFarland reps, with a reborn opportunity, were as delighted as they were panicked.

When I had said yes to the customer, this obligated our vendor to step up. There was no guarantee they would do so, but I knew their management and felt confident they would get behind it.

They did.

I did much of the word processing action myself. This was a little against my principles: Drive the work down to the lowest level possible; don’t let the younger team members off the hook. This builds experience and offers bragging rights.

The timeframe was so tight, however, that doing it right the first time was essential. I had more experience than the rest of the team put together, at least in the mechanics of assembling the document.

My family barely saw me for the next 10 days, and then I caught a flight for a four-day business trip to deliver the oral proposal.

The moment of truth

The board meeting was attended by two dozen in the audience, stakeholders in the decision. They were users of the product. Each of them would be responsible for meeting their own departmental goals. A new technology solution was about to be handed to them, and they were understandably curious.

My friend Charles was the competitor in question. I had crossed swords with him on other occasions. We were on good terms as long as we didn’t get too close to each other. Like two alpha males in separate cages.

Each proposal used the same basic approach — that was how the specs must be answered — and the differences came down to the quality of support, customer service, and the ability to react quickly to solve problems during the 5-year service contract.

And the all-important dimension of personal credibility.

This was roughly a $2 million project. My price exceeded Charlie’s by $365,000. Nearly a 20% pill.

The board choked it down. I think they just didn’t like Charlie.

I couldn’t blame them. Charlie took some getting used to.

The board chair signed my contract the same day. I photographed it, emailed it to my team, then stuffed the original in my briefcase and flew home the next morning.

Takeaways

When there is nothing left to lose, what is there to lose?

My amateur reading of military history has often informed my contemporary business affairs. Two incidents came to mind after the contract was signed and we were well into a difficult and problematic implementation.

These are principles to live by.

Irrational determination

When a tiny U.S. Navy force, innocuously named Taffy-3, was surprised by the entire Japanese surface fleet in the Battle off Samar Island in October, 1944, survival of the force was not expected.

Part of the larger Battle of Leyte Gulf, Taffy-3 consisted of a handful of small aircraft carriers, with planes unequipped for anti-ship operations, and a smaller handful of protective destroyers.

The dozen ships of Taffy-3 were not only outnumbered by the 23 capital warships of the Empire of Japan. The U.S. vessels were all tiny compared to their opponents. A single Japanese battleship, the Yamato, weighed 6 times more by itself than the entire collective weight of the U.S. destroyers opposing it.

One broadside from Yamato’s giant guns threw 29,000 lbs of projectiles at a range of 18 miles. The full broadside from a U.S. destroyer flung 275 lbs at 6 miles. Each destroyer had just under 1% of the firepower of Yamato.

Heroics abounded off Samar Island on an October morning. There is too much to tell here. Commander Ernest Evans of Muskogee, Oklahoma, took USS Johnston, his destroyer, into the teeth of enemy fire at flank speed.

His ship and crew were cruelly mauled. Less than an hour into the battle, his vessel had been reduced to only one operating gun. The engine room reported less than half speed available.

At that point, the severely wounded Evans ordered Johnston to limp into an attack on a portion of the enemy fleet bearing down on the small U.S. carriers. In a naval maneuver rarely used since the days of sail, Evans sought to cross the enemy’s T. He pushed his stricken vessel directly into the path of the oncoming force.

Incredibly, the Japanese attackers scattered before him. Probably they had difficulty identifying the size of his ship, owing to poor visibility in bad weather. They broke off their attack, allowing the American carriers to escape.

Johnston then bore the brunt of the enemy rage. Taking hit after hit, she was soon afire from stem to stern. She rolled over and sank barely two hours after the morning’s engagement had begun. Evans himself, and 2/3 of his crew, were lost in the Philippine Sea.

Did Evans’ defensive maneuver succeed? Absolutely. Was it an unlikely success? Again, absolutely.

What every tactician would have said was impossible, Evans pursued with irrational determination.

Aggressive Reaction

When the Battle of the Bulge commenced in the dead of winter, 1944-45, elements of the U.S. 101st Airborne Infantry became stranded at a Belgian village called Bastogne. With diminishing supplies and ammunition, they were surrounded by an overwhelming enemy force, outnumbered 5-to-1.

Having been badly surprised, Allied strategists met to discuss how to rescue them.

U.S. General George S. Patton offered his Third Army Group. His proposal was accepted. In 24 hours, he turned his entire group — nearly 230,000 men — 90 degrees, from their eastward march to northward. In 7 days, his tank column improbably navigated 100 miles of congested roads and fought their way through stiff resistance.

In one of the incredible and shocking Allied actions of World War II, they successfully relieved the force that became known as The Battered Bastards of Bastogne.

Where others presumed thoughtful consideration, Patton leaped toward aggressive reaction.

David and Goliath

And finally, this, from a somewhat older script.

Before King David was King David, he was Shepherd Boy David. On the occasion when the giant Goliath threatened the army, young David volunteered to be Israel’s champion and do battle.

When the then-king questioned the young man as to why he thought he could have any chance to succeed against a seasoned warrior 9 feet tall and probably 5 times his weight, David replied: “As a shepherd, I had to defend the sheep from attack. I killed the lion, and I killed the bear. This is no different.” (1 Samuel 17:36)

Unreasonable optimism.

Managing a successful career, or family, or marriage, is more art than science. It is more attitude than knowledge. It is more emotion than fact.

Unreasonable optimism is the secret ingredient.

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