SUMMARY

Canadian astronaut, author, and CEO Dave Williams in Leadership Moments from NASA: Achieving the Impossible examines the resilient culture and diverse leadership styles at NASA. In an organization where decisions can literally be matters of life and death, leadership styles matter!

Using oral histories and interviews, Dave Williams and his co-author Elizabeth Howell help us understand many triumphs and tragedies spanning more than 50 years of space exploration. We learn how NASA was able to send a man to the moon in less than a decade of John Kennedy’s announcement and how it continues to daringly push the limits of space exploration with confidence and courage. Despite all its setbacks, NASA has persisted as a place that continues to attract the best and brightest minds.

KEY LEADERSHIP INSIGHTS

• Listen to your team; encourage people to speak up.
• Hire a diverse workforce using a competency-based model; empower bright, capable employees to use their expertise.
• Avoid the pitfall of “not saying we were wrong when we were wrong.”
• Organizational resilience and agility are critical and are often built through bouncing back from failure.

QUOTES FROM WILLIAMS

• “The NASA culture defies the limits of traditional leadership by creating peak-performing teams where each individual strives relentlessly to build their competency, to build trust and to create strong links in a chain that binds the team together.”
• “Leadership is the art of influencing others.”
• “The perspectives on leadership at NASA…have been validated through the results that were achieved with their widespread utilization over the past 60 years of human spaceflight.”

BUY Leadership Moments from NASA: Achieving the Impossible

RECOMMENDATION

• Learn of Williams’s personal experiences in space and NASA leadership in his memoir, Defying Limits: Lessons from the Edge of the Universe.

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