Word: instincts
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William Peacock had just finished a breakfast of Chinese beef and noodles when he felt the plane "shudder, like we were going into a mild stall." His first instinct was to return to his seat just ten feet away, but even that proved a chore. "The aircraft had started to turn a very hard left, and there was this incredible horizontal pressure pushing my entire body to the right." China Airlines Flight 006 from Taipei to Los Angeles, with 243 passengers and 25 crew members aboard, was going down. "Dishes crashed against the walls and floor," Peacock recounted. "The baggage...
...University of Minnesota dropout, Jacobs started working full time in 1959 for his father, a Russian immigrant, who ran a gunnysack business. In the mid-'60s the company flourished, selling sandbags used to dam floods along the Mississippi. Jacobs early showed a trader's instinct, buying merchandise at business liquidation sales and reselling it. At 18, he got 300 pairs of skis at a U.S. Customs auction for $13 a pair, then sold them right outside the auction hall for three times as much...
...drives himself to work from his home in the stylish Minneapolis suburb of Wayzata in a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow II. He makes no claims to being a great long-range corporate planner, even to the point of refusing to keep an appointment calendar. Jacobs is a person of instinct and action. Says he: "You can't predict what I'm going to do next because there is no track, no character to it. Our big asset is our flexibility, being able to move on a moment's notice...
...exception was Gromyko. During Khrushchev's time he made a decision, which proved to be inspired, to cultivate Brezhnev. While others saw Brezhnev as a colorless, unimaginative party careerist without distinction, luck and instinct made Gromyko see something more. Gromyko took Brezhnev's responsibilities as nominal head of state seriously...
...regime's insistence on maintaining a facade of normality reveals the leadership's deep fear of political discontinuity. The same conservative instinct is an important reason why there is no codified process for changes in command and no real tradition of how such changes should be made. The Kremlin's obsession with continuity is confirmed by former Diplomat Arkady Shevchenko, the highest-ranking Soviet official to defect since World War II (see SPECIAL SECTION). Says he: "They have never decided on a new leader before the old one is dead"--or, in the case of Nikita Khrushchev, deposed by collective...