What We Can Learn About Business From Watching Snipers At Work

I have always been interested in killers.

I think it started back in the sixties when a lot of the great film noire detective and murder mystery movies started coming to television. Movies like Out Of The Past and Key Largo and The Big Sleep were among my favourites. Later on there would be great westerns like 3:10 to Yuma and High Noon. I would imagine that the movie stars of the day back then took a lot of delight in play guys that were so bad that they would kill you just as soon as look at you.

Later on in the sixties and seventies, when the killing became more stylized and dramatic, you could almost sense the remorse on the faces of the the killers. They weren’t crazy, they were just in a life and death struggle of one kind or another and doing what they had to do to survive.

There’s a great scene in the Clint Eastwood movie Unforgiven, where he sums it up beautifully. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zKCIf-vfbc

Clint Eastwood’s movie career has been a study in the killer mind in many of its shapes and forms. He played stoic gunslingers, hard boiled detectives, victims turned killers through weird circumstance, killer soldiers and outsiders of all kinds.

As his career advanced and he got into directing, he continued to explore the idea of killers and made one of the landmark movies on the entire experience of being a killer in American Sniper.

The Sniper As Business Mentor

I have personally always been fascinated with the idea of a military snipers, and the level of fear that is generated knowing that you could be being stalked by one and the level of shock that results, for that split second, which is all you get, knowing that you have been hit by one.

There is something very different about the type of creature that gets drawn into this line of work.

The two main character traits that define military snipers are simple and universal. They are discipline and focus.

The Discipline derives from developing a deep understanding of your craft and the tools you use.

In the case of the sniper, it’s the weapons and what they are best for, the sighting devices and the bullets and how they perform.

You also need to understand a great deal about how weather conditions, relative humidity, wind and temperature will affect the trajectory of your bullet and be able to calculate, often in an instant, compensations for those factors.

This is acquired through practice, training, having an experienced mentor and a ton of research.

The Focus is a combination of character and training.

People who gravitate and love the sniper profession understand that anything that comes down to a split second in time that defines the difference between success and failure, needs to be completely and utterly focused on everything that makes that split second work to their advantage.

A huge part of this focus is learning to find and maintain the stillness within you for long periods of time. You need to keep all your senses tuned to the job at hand. Any distractions can easily lead to failure. Any momentary lapse in focus can lead to being discovered, captured and even worse, killed yourself.

"While the tools, purpose & results may be markedly different, there are definitely parallels between the craft of cold-blooded killing and doing business in almost any other less violent field."

Me

The discipline and focus one needs to succeed in business, while nowhere near as precise and demanding as they are for military snipers, are, nonetheless, necessary skills that one needs to develop and constantly hone.

So the next time you have an opportunity to pitch an idea or a piece of business, you would be wise to adapt the military sniper mentality to the project.

And use your discipline and focus to make yourself a true killer. Jim out

Jim Murray is an experienced advertising and marketing professional. He is a communication strategist, writer, art director, broadcast producer, mildly opinionated op/ed blogger & beBee Brand Ambassador.

He is also a partner at Bullet Proof Consulting. www.bulletproofconsulting.ca

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