Take No Prisoners: A No-Holds-Barred Approach to Corporate Excellence

Chapter Seven. Controls

It is said that in the very earliest of airplanes, the pilot often became disoriented in adverse weather and had to rely on the pressure on his rear end to determine if he was upright or in a turn—hence the expression “flying by the seat of your pants.” With the advent of high-speed sophisticated aircraft, today’s pilot has to rely on input from a myriad of onboard computers and instruments to keep him on course and able to react, in time, to potentially adverse conditions.

Today’s business is like a supersonic or even hypersonic aircraft. The contemporary executive needs input from a variety of sources to keep the company on course, often utilizing sophisticated computer-based tools to provide adequate warning signals of ...