Illusion or Reality: 7 Fundamentals of Realistic Leadership
Illusion or Reality: 7 Fundamentals of Realistic Leadership
I recently watched a video of David Copperfield, the famous illusionist, making the Statue of Liberty vanish in front of a group of spectators. It weighs 450,000 pounds and stands 305 feet tall, so moving it is not an easy task. To accomplish this trick, Copperfield set up a stage at night for the viewing audience to sit on. The stage was framed in front by pillars which held a curtain secured at ground level and lifted up to block their view of the statue. A circle of lights at ground level illuminated it, and its presence was tracked on a radar screen visible to all. He presented the statue to the audience, then raised the curtain for a few moments. When the curtain dropped again, search lights beamed through where the statue should have stood, showing that nothing was there. It had vanished, only leaving the ground level lights to show its footprint. After raising the curtain again for a few moments, Copperfield then dropped it to reveal the statue, back in place.
How did he do it? During the period of time that the curtain was raised, the audience viewing platform and pillars rotated slowly to the right, so that when the curtain dropped, the statue was behind a pillar. Blaring music throughout the entire show distracted the spectators, and the radar display was fake.
Copperfield’s spectacular show, performed in 1983, was full of entertainment and flair. The audience was amazed, even in the midst of the fact the sculpture couldn’t simply disappear. They couldn’t figure out how it was done, thus they bought into the reality of the illusion, that was listed by the Guinness Book of World Records in 2014 as the largest disappearance ever performed by a magician.
Illusions
We’re often spectators to other illusions in our world, not necessarily executed by traditional magicians. Such illusions may be manifested in the form of major initiatives taken on by leaders and their teams to accomplish admirable goals. But they lose sight of the organizational realities. (more…)