The Power of Perceptions

8/14/2019 The Power of Perceptions

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The Power Of Perceptions


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In 1991 I Purchased A Four-Year Old Audi 5000 Automobile For$2,500.

When the car was new, it had been listed at$40,000. It was really beautiful inside. It hadall sorts of electronic controls, poweredeverything, and it drove incredibly well. In fact,I can honestly say that the Audi 5000 was oneof the nicest cars I have ever owned. In the

entire time I owned the car, I had very fewproblems with it. The car was very comfortablein all respects, and it cost me less than a mucholder, cheap compact car would have. As far asI was concerned, I had gotten the mostfantastic deal imaginable.

I drove the car for a decent amount of time,and was always a little upset that I sold it. Thecar was very well made, and one of the mainreasons I was driving it was because I did not

care what other people thought.


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You May Be Asking Yourself How Anyone Could Purchase Such AGreat Car

for such a cheap price. It made a lot of senseat the time, since no one wanted to own an Audi5000, which was considered unsafe and extremelydangerous by everyone due to a 60Minutes episode called Out of Control which airedin 1986. Since that episode of60 Minutes wasbroadcast, almost overnight, the resale value of theAudi 5000 had been destroyed, and everyone wastrying to unload them as quickly as they could.Anybody who wanted to could go out and purchasean Audi 5000 that was a few years old for pennieson the dollar.

Out of Control was all about complaints ofunintended acceleration of the Audi 5000 car. Theshow featured a distraught mother, Kristi Bradosky,who had run over her six year old son when the carhad allegedly lurched forward in her garage without

warning.


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Monday, December 18, 1989, the Wall Street Journal Ran A StoryConcerning the Scare That

Had been generated by the 60 Minutes episode:

If youre the kind of driver who sometimes hastrouble finding the brakes in your car, you should bedriving an Audi. Last month, in 35mph crash tests ofan airbag-equipped Audi 100, the mannequin in the

drivers seat suffered the lowest crash force everrecorded by the National Highway and Traffic SafetyAdministration, NHTSA, in this kind of test.

And yet, according to the Center for Auto Safetyaself styled public interest organization that sells its

research to plaintiffs lawyersthe Audi 100spredecessor, the Audi 5000, was as deadly as theAudi 100 is safe. It exhibited sudden acceleration,a fatal propensity to take off at full speed even asthe terrified driver rammed the brake pedal to thefloor.


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CBSs 60 Minutes ran a devastatingexpos of the Audi 5000. Audicustomers fled. Lawyers cashed in.

The American public was saved, yetagain, from the perils of technologygone awry. Only one little noticedfootnote remains at the end: There

was nothing wrong with the car.


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The Audi Story Is By Now, Dismally Familiar.Sudden acceleration accidents occurred when the

transmission was shifted out of park. The driveralways insisted he was standing on the brake, butafter the crash the brakes always worked perfectly. Adisproportionate number of accidents involved driversnew to the vehicle. When an idiot-proof shift wasinstalled so that a driver could not shift out of park ifhis foot was on the accelerator, reports of suddenacceleration plummeted.

But a story to the effect that cars accelerate whendrivers step on the accelerator doesnt boost

television ratings or jury verdicts. And driver error isunderstandably hard to accept for a mother whoseerrant foot killed her six year old son. So with the helpof such mothers, CAS and CBS knitted together atissue of conjecture, insinuation, and calumny. Thecars cruise control was at fault. Or maybe the

electronic idle. Or perhaps the transmission.


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60 Minutes, In One Of Journalisms Most Shameful Hours

Gave air time in November 1986 to a self styled expertwho drilled a hole in an Audi transmission and pumpedin air at high pressure. Viewers didnt see the drill or thepumpjust the doctored car blasting off like a rocket.

Junk science of this kind moves fast. Real science takestime to catch up with this kind of intellectual cockroachand squash it. Government agencies in Japan andCanada, as well as in the US, conducted painstakingstudies. The Canadians who are franker about such

things, called it driver error. In America, where wecant attach blame to anyone whose name doesnt endwith Inc., it was called pedal misapplication. Andunsurprisingly, its not just Audi drivers who commit it.


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So, In The Long Run, The Truth Does Come Out.

In the short run, the lawyers swoopin. Most soon recognized that theycouldnt prove any defect in theAudis engine or transmission. But our

liability system today is a master ofthe bait and switchthe switch wasto pedal misdesign.

No doubt about it, the original Audi like other Europeancars, placed brake and accelerator pedals slightly closertogether than is usual in many American designs. This

allows the good driver to move faster between the pedalsin a high-speed emergency. Perhaps it also makes iteasier for the bad driver to mix up the pedals. Nobody,including NHTSA, is quite sure whether, overall, the oldAudi pedal placement was marginally better or marginallyworse. End of case? Hardly. With Audi shell-shocked and

vulnerable from the earlier junk engineering claims, thepedal placement lawyers moved in.


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Trial Judges In New Jersey and New York Have Overturned BadPedal Design Verdicts Against Audi.

Last July a federal court in Pennsylvania issued a summaryjudgment for Audi. And that should have been the end ofAudis legal troubles.

Except that it wasnt.

An appellate court reinstated the original New Jersey verdict:an appeal is pending. The New York case was settled beforeretrial. A California jury returned a $3.5 million verdict againstAudi on a pedal placement theory, after the plaintiffs lawyersabandoned a sudden acceleration claim. Another appeal is

pending. Today, Audi is reportedly defending itself in morethan 140 different suits, and damage claims are in excess of$5 billion. Not that the aggregate claims have the slightestconnection with reality, of course. At one point, a singleplaintiff in New York filed identical $5 billion claims in bothfederal and state courts; both have since been thrown out.


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Yes, sudden acceleration is real. Apowerful engine kicks into gear withoutwarning or reason, it crashes through arespected business, ruins the livelihood

of hundreds of innocent dealers, anddevalues the property of hundreds ofthousands of bewildered car owners.

The windfall goes to those who destroy,

and then successfully blame others forthe wreckage. For heavens sake,where are the brakes?


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As A Consequence Of the 60 Minutes Story

Sales of Audis in the United States collapsed.According to one account:

The show had an enormous impact in themarketplace. Sales of all Audi models in the

US, which had peaked at 74,061 in 1985,plunged sharply after the 60Minutes broadcasts. It was a nightmare forthe company, says Thomas McDonald,former head of public relations at Audisparent, Volkswagen of America, Inc. We lost

billions of dollars in sales and revenues.Audis average annual sales of 14,000 carsfrom 1991 to 1995 were just 19 percent of itspre 60 Minutes peak.


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No One Was Ever Able To Duplicate the Alleged Occurrence OfUnintended Acceleration With the Car.

Not a single person who filed a case against

Audi ever won.

Nevertheless, even to this day a perception stillseems to linger in the marketplace that Audis aresomehow dangerous and unsafe.What the Audi example teaches and has alwaystaught me is that perceptions are one of the mostimportant things to take note of. 60 Minutes, with allof its marketing might, was able to shape perceptionsand the way people viewed Audi cars. Despite thefact that nothing was wrong with the car, 60

Minutes was able to change the way an entiregeneration of people perceived the automobilesmanufactured by a particular company, and thisalmost destroyed the company in the process. One ofthe most powerful and important aspects of ourcareers and our lives is how we are perceived by

others, and how we control our own perceptions ofthose around us.


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People Can Use Perceptions To Their Advantage Or To TheirDisadvantage.

The most successful people are able to useperceptions to their advantage. After all,everything we may surmise about a person, a

job, or any situation is based upon ourperceptions. Often how something is perceivedmatters more than the facts surrounding it.

For years I have opened the paper each weekand seen various advertisements by Americancar companies, wherein they try and comparetheir cars with German or Japanese rivals. Forexample, the company may have a chart that

shows that the American car stops in a fivefoot shorter distance, that the car acceleratesa little faster that its Japanese counterpart andthat its JD Power Initial Quality Survey score ishigher.


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I Have Seen These Advertisements And Their Corresponding

Charts For 25+ Years

And every single year Americanmanufacturers have sold fewer andfewer cars in the United States. At the

same time, the Japanese havecontinued to sell more cars eachyear. I think that what is going onhere is that people simply havedifferent perceptions. The Japanesecars are perceived as better. Theadvertisers can throw around all ofthe facts and figures they want.People simply tend to have a betterperception of Japanese cars.Perceptions matter more than facts.


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A Couple Of Years Ago My Assistant Was Out Purchasing Me ALittle Television For My Bedroom.

She called me from the store and gaveme two options. One was a brand of

television I had never heard of, LG, andthe other was a Sony. She told me the LGone was bigger, had a nicer picture, andwas a lot cheaper. I did not care. I told

her to buy the Sony television. This wasall because of my perception of the Sonybrand. I had a much better perception ofSony than I had of LG, and consequently

there were no facts that could change mymindnot even the fact that the LG model

may have indeed had a bigger and betterpicture; and it definitely did cost less than

the Sony model.


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Many People Feel That Their Job Search And The Quality Of theJob They Get

Is a battle of their rsum, and that theirentire future depends on what is visibleon their rsum. For example, people

who go to the best colleges often assumethey will get a much better job than thosewho go to lesser colleges. People whohave the best work experience believethey will generally get the best job. Thereis a tremendous amount of truth to this

reasoning; however, more important thanany of this is how we are perceived.Perceptions matter far more than facts.


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When I Was Recruiting Full Time I Remember That I Did Not CareAs Much About

what was on someones rsum as whothey were, and how they wereperceived.

My greatest love in recruiting was managing howan employer perceived someone. Managing aperception, instead of just the black and whitecharacteristics surrounding a person, wasprobably the most important thing I could do. Iremember I met a girl once who was losing her

job at a highly prestigious law firm in LosAngeles. I sat down with her and learned that shehad grown up on a hippie colony with herparents, and that her father had some extremebeliefs about growing his own food and so forth.


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She Had Been Rebelling Against This Lifestyle Over the Course OfHer Entire Life

And consequently she had becomeincredibly disciplined and motivatedto succeed as a lawyer. This material

made for incredibly interestingreading for the law firms thatinterviewed her, and I remember thather being perceived as someone whowas rebelling against theantiestablishment went over verywell. I remember writing a 15-pageletter to the law firms about thisaspect of this womans personality.


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What Most Recruiters Would Have Done With This Girl Is

Send her around to law firms andso forth without managing herpresentationand therefore theperceptions of those that mighthire her. She would have simply

been presented as someone

seeking a position at a new firm, agirl who had had a job at a goodlaw firm and who had attended adecent law school. This would not

have done her too much good,however. What the best recruiters

do, and what really changeseverything around for the jobseeker, is conscientiously and

properly shape the perceptions ofthe employers about theprospective employee.


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There Is A Very Good Documentary On HBO About the DisgracedEvangelical Minister Ted Haggard.

Haggard was a well known Evangelical leaderwho was the former president of the National

Evangelical Association, representing 30million Christians. He was also the Founder ofthe 14,000-member New Life Church. In 2006,

Haggard resigned after a male prostituteclaimed that Haggard had hired him numeroustimes for gay sex and used crystal meth with

him. The fascinating documentary followsHaggard after being expelled from the Church

as he moves from town to town looking for

work. Unable to get a job, Haggard eventuallygets a job as a traveling insurance salesman.Seeing Haggard go from a powerful man who

is on top of the world and lecturing tens ofthousands of people, meeting with Americanpresidents, and being interviewed on major

news programsto someone whose entire


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What Makes the Haggard Story So Interesting Is That It Shows,Like the Audi Example

That everything is about perceptions. Thepublic perception of Haggard was changedovernight when it came out that he did notrepresent what he stood for, having engaged inbehavior that was considered immoral. The

public perception of Audi was changedovernight when people started to believe thecar was incredibly dangerous, because of anews program. Ultimately, the truth was thatthe Audi 5000 was among the top cars in termsof safety on the road.

You need to realize the power of perceptions inyour life, and to use them to your advantage.Aim to control, shape and influence theperceptions that others have about you.Consciously work to create the image you will

project to those around you.


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One Of the Most Fascinating Things To Me About Recruiting HasAlways Been

What happens when a given law firm gets a badreputation. The law firm may have earned a badreputation due to a partner going to prison, or dueto consistent layoffs, or something else alongthese lines. In most cases, the reputation isconfined to only one aspect of the law firm. Forexample, out of 10 practice groups in the law firmthere may be a problem with only one practicegroupnot every practice group. What ends uphappening, however, is that people often do not gobeneath this skin to recognize that the trueproblems within the law firm are really confined toonly 10% of the entire organization. What thismeans is that there are less applicants andtherefore more opportunities available for peopleto get jobs at this firm, who might not otherwiseget jobs there. This is all due to a poor perception

about the firm that is not well founded.


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Perceptions are often far moreimportant than facts. You willget a better job due to how

you are perceived over andabove how good your rsumis. You manage how you areperceived by the people youknow, how you present

yourself to the world and howyour reputation will grow. Themost important thing you cando in your life and career ismake perceptions work for

you.

The Power of Perceptions

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