 Our first lesson deals with performance as something very different than activity. It is not doing things that fires achievement, but knowing what you must get done. Let me introduce you to Doug the Caveman. He lives in a hole in the side of a hill, and he lives by hunting and foraging. He lives in the presence of dangerous animals, and many of these are quite willing to hunt him for food. And so he goes armed with a sharp-flint spear and another flint that he has sharpened into a cutting tool. Now we give Doug a modern hammer. He sees immediately that this is much stronger than his spear and a far better weapon than his flint knife. The tongs won't break when he applies it to his pig's tough skull. So why doesn't Doug use it to build himself other tools, or to build a protection from the weather so that he doesn't have to cower in a hole? Doug has never seen such things, and he has no nails, and the idea of building structures is far beyond anything in his experience. And so it is with the tools you will encounter in this study of performance. These are tools that you have to see in use before you learn real appreciation for what they can do. And what you can do with them tomorrow is just the beginning of what you will be able to do in the future. And this brings us to our first technical performance tool, the engineering black box. I was in an engineering laboratory for a circuit design course when I first encountered this lesson. We were presented with a black wooden box fixed with a hasp and lock so that we could not open it to see what was inside. Each end of the box had two electrical terminals. Our given task was first to apply electrical current and power to one end and to measure the results on the other. Then based on what we found we were to design an electrical circuit that would give the same results. But that is not the lesson we were to learn. When we turned in our papers the boxes were placed still locked back on the shelf. We had already learned how to apply various power sources and take measurements. We had already learned how to design circuits. These were not the lessons being taught. The lesson was the box itself. That we did not have to know what was in the box. The lesson was that what was in the box didn't matter because we had just designed a circuit that could replace it. It was a performance lesson. It was one of the most important engineering lessons of all. If you know what went into a performance effort and you know what came out you can always design a process to replace whatever was being done before. This lesson has amazing versatility for the engineer. When it comes to solving a performance problem you just need to know the desired result and the resources that are available. The rest is distraction. You can take all the details, the unknowns and all those distractions and you can lock them out of sight in a black box. You can concentrate on what you have to do to achieve the result instead of worrying over all the details. On his daughter's fifth birthday John, a former football player, takes her to her first live football game. She is clearly challenged by the noise and excitement of the game and he explains the purpose as moving the football to the far end of the field. She learns to cheer for her dad's team and gets caught up in the excitement of the game. Having won 14-6 John takes Susie down on the field where he reunites with his old coach sharing both the win and their history. Susie, finding dad engaged in paying no attention, wanders off to the bench, picks up a football. She has to use both her little arms to carry it but does so. She is almost at the far end of the field when John realizes that she has wandered off and he spies her carrying the ball cradled in her arms. Glancing back at the sound of his voice she completes her walk into the end zone before turning and coming back still carrying the ball. When she is approaching the sidelines again he asks, What are you doing baby? She finishes her walk before answering and setting the ball carefully down tells him, I knew it couldn't be that hard. If the purpose was to move the ball as her father told her then Susie was able to move the ball. The lesson is that we are daily taught to concentrate on processes, on how we do things rather than to look to the desired end result. Fighting and maintaining our own focus on a valuable end result will require discipline. The desired result for the players was to win the game, moving the ball to the end of the field was part of the process they used to win. The crowd in the stands did not share purpose with those on the field, they were there taking part in the crowd and cheering for their champions. Their purpose was entertainment, enjoying the drama and appreciating the skills and effort of those who took part in winning. For us, the lesson is that performance only has meaning when we have something to accomplish.