The Laws of Subtraction by Matthew E. May

Author:Matthew E. May
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
Published: 2013-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE

It’s one thing to give a time-constrained talk for a few minutes; it’s quite another to send a spaceship into space on a shoestring. It takes a special kind of person to be inspired by a mandate riddled with risk and having little margin for error, such as the one issued by NASA to its Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California: “Take risks but don’t fail.”

Such a person is Brian Muirhead, who at age 41 in 1993 accepted the job as flight systems manager of the Mars Pathfinder project and with it the NASA challenge to land a cutting-edge, remote-controlled robotic all-terrain rover on Mars that would reliably beam back images, collect samples, and return scientific data on the red planet. The only catch: he was given just three years and $150 million to do it. The immediately preceding Mars Observer, which carried a $1 billion price tag and had taken 10 years, had just been lost in space, an embarrassing failure for the U.S. space program. No one in his or her right mind would want to manage the next Mars project, if indeed there was one. At the time Brian accepted the job, project funding was not guaranteed.

Brian is a quiet, cerebral, and unassuming rocket scientist. Now chief engineer at JPL, he has a significantly bigger title, significantly less hair, and significantly more white in his beard than when I first met him, undoubtedly as a result of his almost 35 years of intense involvement with high-profile missions in pursuit of JPL’s mission to push the outer edge of space exploration.

Brian was a frequent visitor to the Toyota campus during my tenure there. After reading his 1999 book High Velocity Leadership, we invited Brian to guest speak about the Mars Pathfinder project, and he soon became a regular fixture in the University of Toyota’s “lean” leadership curriculum. Through the sessions I became quite familiar with Brian and his saga. It was and remains one of the most compelling examples of how to use seemingly impossible constraints to tap into and guide human creativity in a team setting.

“Faster, better, cheaper” was the phrase used by a frustrated Mark Albrecht, staff director for the White House National Space Council, in a 1990 article he published calling for new management approaches at NASA. Albrecht’s plea responded to a series of multi-billion-dollar NASA proposals for returning to the moon and exploring human expeditions to Mars: “the basic goal is to do things faster, cheaper, safer, better.” The wholesale failure of the 1992 Mars Observer project sealed NASA’s fate, and in early 1992 President George Bush appointed a new NASA administrator, Dan Goldin. Goldin laid out the “faster, better, cheaper” approach in a speech he gave later that year:

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