Description:
The leader of a major NASA mission provides a practical guide to developing teams that excel in high-stakes situations.
Lindy Elkins-Tanton leads NASA's Psyche mission, a $1.2 billion megaproject that sent a spacecraft on an eight-year journey to investigate an asteroid between Mars and Jupiter. Along the way, she has managed challenges ranging from potentially catastrophic technological malfunctions and overbudget subcontractors to fraught email chains about who clogged the toilet. And she has done it all while building an extraordinary team culture. In Mission Ready, Elkins-Tanton shows other leaders how to do the same.
Mission Ready provides a blueprint for building strong teams capable of delivering exceptional results in high-pressure situations. Leaders set the tone, but every team member determines both their own success and the success of the team. Drawing on social science, cognitive science, and organizational science research, Elkins-Tanton gives practical advice on how both individual contributors and leaders can excel. Even for projects that don't involve launching a rocket into space, the lessons in this book will help listeners guide their teams to new heights.
Brief description:
Lindy Elkins-Tanton is a world-renowned planetary scientist and member of the National Academy of Sciences. She is the principal investigator of the NASA Psyche mission, and director of the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Previously, she was vice president at Arizona State University, director of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution for Science, and faculty at MIT. Among her major original research achievements are the discovery that the Siberian flood basalts caused the end-Permian extinction, the revelation that rocky planets are born wet, and the concept of "drip volcanism." Asteroid (8252) Elkins-Tanton is named for her.
Review Quotes:
"Space missions fail for human reasons--and succeed because of them. With a great selection of space-flight stories and grounded research, Elkins-Tanton delivers a model for leadership that shows how clarity, kindness, and courage lead to mission success for any team."
-- " Bob Smith, former CEO, Blue Origin"