It was a disconcerting thing, and it brought our meeting to a complete halt. As we sat around a boardroom table, arguing over a merger, a lizard began to crawl across the outside face of the window, as casually as if it were in a garden in Poughkeepsie and not 50 stories above a concrete sidewalk in Manhattan.

The meeting had been a particular arduous one up to that moment. I was getting nowhere fast and my position was particularly tenuous. Just like that lizard, I was flying high, but at the same time, barely hanging on.

The room fell silent as we were immediately and totally captured by the drama unfolding before us. The lizard on the outside stalked a fly on the inside of the glass. When it moved, he moved, but he could not catch it.

After a few moments of this, the lizard suddenly scurried away, leaving us laughing aloud as we went back to work and with a lesson learned by observation – when a thing can’t be done at all, do another thing.

All contention fell away and the merger went through.