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Neil Armstrong passed away last week.

Those of us who, in spite of having come of age in the ’60s can remember some of it remember that once, we traveled between worlds and thought the investment worthwhile. When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon’s surface, all of us stepped there … “One giant leap for mankind,” as he put it, at a time when “mankind” was understood to include both men and women.

Sure, there was carping about spending on space travel when there were problems to solve here on earth. It was based on a misunderstanding, though: As Isaac Asimov pointed out, we didn’t take billions of dollars’ worth of gold to the moon and bury it there. We spent it all right here on earth, employing scientists, engineers, mechanics, construction workers.

And astronauts.

If the only benefit we cared about was economic impact, the innovations funded by the space program made it one of the four best investments we ever made as a society (and by “as a society” I mean made through our collective will, exercised through our government), along with the transcontinental railroad, interstate highway system, and Internet.

Financial benefit isn’t the only kind of benefit worth tallying, though. At a time when U.S. society was shattering into pieces, visiting the moon was something astonishing the United States accomplished that no other country on earth could do. And yes, U.S. society was that bad. Those who describe our current political dialog as the worst they’ve ever seen don’t remember the Democratic Convention of 1968, when Chicago’s mayor screamed the k-word at Abraham Ribicoff while his police ran riot over the hippies occupying Grant Park.

It was that bad. Being “part of the system” was enough to brand a person as beyond the pale among a significant segment of the population, and they weren’t entirely wrong: The “system” was, at the time, corrupt, racist, sexist, and, for many, desperate to an extent far beyond the worst of 2012.

Our predecessors in the field of IT (it was called “data processing” back then) were, by the way, despised by most Americans, who weren’t entirely wrong in feeling that way, as computer errors led to ordinary citizens receiving enormous and incorrect bills for which collection agencies dunned them (and also, on more than one occasion, their receiving entirely accurate bills for $0 past due — pay immediately or we’ll turn you over to a collection agency).

Back then, a popular act of protest against “the system” was to bend, fold, spindle and mutilate the punch card enclosed with the bill, disobeying the vendor’s admonition to the contrary.

And yet, the ’60s were also a time when America’s best minds became scientists and engineers so they could work at NASA to invent something that could help us get to the moon. Now, those with equivalent talent become “quants” who work on Wall Street to invent financial derivatives so as to make themselves wealthy enough to buy the moon.

And it was a time when a favorite expression among those in the counterculture was, “If you aren’t part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” a sentiment I haven’t heard expressed in any form in the decades that followed, and sorely miss.

Also in the ’60s favor: Disco hadn’t been invented yet.

In 1969 we could go to the moon. In 2012, not only can’t we, we seem to have lost our appetite for it … for exploration for its own sake, for investing in knowledge gained for its own sake, and for investing when the returns are something our descendants will see, not ourselves.

Here’s how bad it is: Curiosity (the Mars rover, not the character trait) cost each and every American less than ten bucks, and yet I know people who complain about the expense.

Neil Armstrong was a proxy for all of us, for what we as Americans, and as human beings, could be, in the middle of a war in Vietnam that showed our ability to be the exact opposite.

On his death, his family released a statement that reads in part: “For those who may ask what they can do to honor Neil, we have a simple request. Honor his example of service, accomplishment and modesty, and the next time you walk outside on a clear night and see the moon smiling down at you, think of Neil Armstrong and give him a wink.”

Do more. Give him a nod as well. Ask yourself whether, given a choice, you’d rather be remembered for the wealth you accumulated, or for being the first person to walk on the moon.

Plan accordingly.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Imagine you’re about to launch the biggest strategic program in your company’s history. Who would you put in charge of it if you had your pick:

  • The best project manager currently in your employ?
  • The best project manager you could recruit using your usual internal and contract recrutiers?
  • NASA’s David Lavery, the Mars Science Laboratory program executive?

Me too.

Why has NASA been able to deliver such a stunning stream of successful projects … from the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers, to Cassini, to Chandra, to Odyssey, to, most recently, Curiosity?

Answer: It decided to learn from its failures rather than running from them by “holding people accountable” (ManagementSpeak for “finding a convenient scapegoat while making sure we never find out what’s really going on”).

In the late 1990s, the Mars Climate Orbiter, Polar Lander, and Deep Space 2 missions all went wrong due to easily prevented technical flubs. The Climate Orbiter mission, for example, used English units of measure for some calculations, which other calculations that used the results assumed were in metric units. This led to its entering the Martian atmosphere at too steep an angle.

In hold-’em-accountable corporate cultures, company executives would do their best to find out who screwed up and fire the sorry SOBs before they could do any more damage.

They would, that is, ensure that a new set of sorry SOBs would screw up future projects in different but parallel ways.

NASA, to its credit, performed thorough post-mortem analyses instead. The first is titled, “Mars Climate Orbiter Mishap Investigation Board Phase I Report“; the second is titled, “Report on the Loss of the Mars Polar Lander and Deep Space 2 Missions.”

While much in these reports is so deeply technical that only the nerdiest engineers would appreciate it, everyone involved in project management, sponsorship or governance in any organization should take the time to read Section 3 of the Polar Lander report, because that’s the section that discusses the management failures that underlay the missions’ technical mistakes.

The deep root cause turned out to be funding and schedule pressure: NASA tried to get these missions done quickly and on the cheap … too quickly and too cheaply. This prime root cause led to a number of project management failures, the most important of which were:

  • Inadequate staffing: Not only was the project team too small, but critical JPL experts weren’t part of the team – the project didn’t have sufficient depth of highly knowledgeable staff.
  • Excessive overtime: 60 hour weeks were habitual and 80 hour weeks were common for extended periods of time, because there just weren’t enough people on the team to get the job done on schedule any other way.
  • Insufficient communication and collaboration: Inadequate staffing and excessively long work weeks inevitably led to team members working heads-down and with blinders on. They weren’t in a position to help each other out, check each others’ work, or otherwise function as a team.
  • No system testing and validation, relying instead on analysis and modeling alone.

NASA isn’t alone in having projects fail, although unlike, say, an automobile manufacturer that releases a design flaw into production, NASA can’t issue a recall to fix the problem.

Still, just as recalls are more expensive than fixing a flaw during the design process (but less expensive than plowing into Mars at high speeds instead of landing on it), it’s a pretty good bet that your company would profit from managing its projects better, too.

So learn from NASA’s mistakes, just as NASA did. That avoiding the project management mistakes listed above makes a difference is hard to deny, given the string of successes that’s followed.

Even more important than learning from NASA’s mistakes, though, is adopting its technique for learning from its mistakes. NASA invested heavily in an independent review, didn’t duck its findings, and implemented serious changes in its procedures as a result.

I keep reading opinionators who extol the efficiency of private enterprise as compared to how gummint agencies do things. And yet, while I know of quite a few failed projects in private enterprise, I’ve yet to read of any companies that undertook equivalent attempts to understand how their management practices contributed to the failures.

It is, in the end, the difference between taking responsibility and holding people accountable. Because when executives hold people accountable, what they’re really doing is failing to take responsibility – not only for hiring and retaining the people they now need to hold accountable, but, far more important, for creating the circumstances that led to the failure and allowing them to persist.

It’s a great way to lose good employees while retaining bad managers.

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