The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 324: Charles Fishman - How To Create A Culture Of Learning From Failure

Episode Date: August 18, 2019

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk Full Show Notes can be found at www.LearningLeader.com #324: Charles Fishman Charles Fishman is the acclaimed author of One Giant Leap, A Curious Mind (with Brian Grazer), The Wal-Mart Effect, and The Big Thirst. He is a three-time winner of the Gerald Loeb Award, the most prestigious prize in business journalism. Notes:  Leaders who sustain excellence = They insist on excellence. "The work needs to be as good as it can be." Getting to the moon was the largest project in the history of civilization Clarity of the mission - Everyone must know the goal Must keep people motivated Standards must be clear - And the reasoning behind each action (intentional) President Kennedy was frustrated with how the U.S. was doing versus the Russians in space.  He needed to make a bold statement.  When it was made, the administration felt there was a 50/50 shot that it could happen. It was important to announce broad goal and the reason behind it "Take the stairs" - Think of it as a blessing. "I get to do this." Not because it is easy, but because it is hard. "A master stroke of leadership because it was a stretch goal, but it wasn't insanity."  It must be balanced. There are tapes of JFK talking scientific discovery where it was obvious he had little understanding of it.  -->  It's important to have people you have confidence in leading areas where you're lacking knowledge. "If JFK wasn't assassinated, we may not have gone to the moon.  He was starting to get cold feet about the cost." The space program created a culture of learning from failure: "Every single failure had to be investigated, understood, and resolved." "No Random Failures" was the motto. "Every failure is a gift." -- There were 14,000 recorded failures in testing. Collaboration -- How to keep so many people aligned?  There were 400,000 people from 20,000 companies working on the Apollo missions! NASA's management style: Clearly defined roles - What are your solutions to the problems? Gave assignments and qualities that needed to be met NASA had a culture where they brought everyone together for in person meetings.  "Every minute of a mission would be walked through." There was transparency and decisions got made. Get people together in person and do something important.  This built camaraderie among the dispirit teams. Bill Tindall -- A mission planning genius on space navigation.  He was also gracious, self-effacing, and had a great sense of humor. Bill respected what others had done, had respect for the mission.  He had the confidence to be calm.  A different person who used a different manner would have been a disaster working with the leaders at MIT. People have to be persuaded to follow you. Both Gene Kranz and Bill Tindall were unafraid to hear input.  They were confident enough to find the right answer (wherever it came from). We are entering the most exciting time in space travel (Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos)

It's an important lesson for all of us to take, but not to over-interpret. What Kennedy knew was that announcing the goal, announcing the mission and the reason for it, the sense of urgency behind it, that dramatically shifted the odds. The moment he said, we need to do this, we can do it. This is what America is about, reaching for something that is out of reach and making it possible. that changed the odds in in favor of success. Welcome to the Learning Leader Show, brought to you by Brixie and Meyer. I am Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here.

Text learners to 4-4-2-2-2 in order to join tens of thousands of learning leaders from all over the world. Received Mindful Monday updates what I'm reading, watching, thinking about, and writing. Also, give you the opportunity to be part of my book launch. team, text learners to 4422. Now on to tonight's featured leader. It's award-winning journalist and New York Times, bestselling author Charles Fishman. He started reporting on the U.S. space program as a Washington Post reporter covering the space shuttle challenger disaster.

Most recently, he's written an incredible book titled One Giant Leap, the Impossible Mission that flew us to the moon. A few of the topics we discussed. roughly 400,000 people worked to make the moon landings possible. What can we learn from that collaborative effort and how to implement that to our businesses? Then the leadership takeaways from President John F. Kennedy's legendary, we choose to go to the moon speech. Then how to create a culture of learning from failure, followed up by two drastically different leadership styles and why both worked. and how you, again, can implement this to your business.

Ladies and gentlemen, so good with Charles Fishman. All right, Charles Fishman, so good to have you here on The Learning Leader Show. Welcome. Thank you so much for having me, Ryan. I have really been looking forward to this one because it's funny. I know you've been on this tour talking a lot about Apollo and us going to the moon, especially in light of the 50th anniversary. But you started with writing a book that caught my eye alongside

Oscar-winning producer Brian Grazer called a curious mind, the secret to a bigger life. And I am, I've really leaned into curiosity as I've matured. And so with that in mind, Charles, I am curious. From your perspective and your experiences in life, whether it's writing and studying Walmart, sitting side by side with an Oscar-winning producer to write a book, and then studying the excellence that was,

the Apollo program and sending somebody to the moon. What have you found to be the commonalities among leaders who sustain excellence? Well, I mean, the first thing to say, which isn't the most obvious or insightful response, is they insist on excellence, right? So you want the work to be as good as it can be under the circumstances. So that's sort of thought one. Thought two, and this is certainly true in Apollo. Apollo was getting to the moon was really all about leadership. It was about the big vision leadership. It was about leadership at the top of NASA. You had the largest project in the history of human civilization outside of a war that by the way came in on time, on budget, scandal-free and was a success. And it was a government project. So that's clearly, there's leadership

there. And of course, Apollo involved leadership at all kinds of levels. Every bit of technology from the Saturn 5 and the lunar module and the command module, the big, familiar stuff, to the smallest stuff, the spacesuits. That was at each of those elements was in the hands of a group of people who had leaders and any if any one of those things had gone off the rails it wouldn't have happened so what's the commonality there i think clarity of the mission clarity of the goal and how you kept people motivated to chase the clarity of the mission and the clarity of the goal and also the standards one of the things about apollo that was all new is that a single flaw, a single one or zero in the computer wrong,

could doom a mission and it could doom the astronauts themselves. That's hard to believe perhaps, but I'm happy to tell you a story that illustrates that. And so while the big leadership mattered, where are we going? Why are we going there? Why is this important? and that was important all the way through the eight years, at the factory floor level, keeping people motivated, keeping and helping them understand why they couldn't sort of be distracted even if the work was tedious, that's a kind of leadership too.

If you don't get execution, it doesn't matter how wonderful and inspirational your goals are. And so I think making the goal clear, making the standards, you need people to hit clear, and also giving people the reason you're doing this so that they understand even when the going gets tough, here's why I'm trying to accomplish this. To me, and that applies to finishing a movie, right? Movies go off the rails all the time. And it certainly applies to the arena I spent a lot of time in for my first book, Walmart, where those folks had a clear vision and also relentless execution, and they still do.

do, by the way. Let's go to May of 1961. President John F. Kennedy delivers the infamous speech you've written that almost did not take place. Originally, it was just a message to Congress, but he decided the day before to give that speech publicly. At the time when he made this announcement, this declaration of what we were going to do, the technology to do it had not yet been invented. So from a leadership perspective, did he actually believe this was possible? And how would you relate that then to today and leaders and businesses of all shapes and sizes, Charles, as to should we make these grand statements that would involve technology that has not been invented yet? And why would somebody do that? Okay, well, there's a lot there. That's a great question. So Kennedy didn't just

stand up on a Friday afternoon in May and say, let's go to the moon. He was frustrated with how the U.S. was doing compared to the Soviet Union in space. That frustration had been percolating since he'd become president. But what sort of set him off was the Soviets launching the first human being into space. That was Uri Gagarin. That happened April 12th, so just about six weeks before his speech. And to be honest, a few days after that, the U.S. back forces invaded Cuba in the Bay of Pigs. That was a disaster. Within the same week, there were two global humiliations. And Kennedy wanted a bold move, a bold statement that showed that the U.S. was not losing a step to the communists. But he didn't say this is what we're going to do. He said, what can we do? And

there's a famous meeting in a cabinet room where they said, you know, the boldest thing we could do is say that we're going to go to the moon. The Russians aren't in a better position to do that than we are. They're far ahead with this small early space mission stuff that we, that neither of us know how to do that well yet. But in terms of going to the moon, they don't have any advantage. And then he had Vice President Johnson run a kind of mini six-week skunk works. Is it possible? what are the people who will have to do it say about whether it's possible? Is it the right thing? What's it going to cost?

What do a range of people in companies as well as inside NASA say? What does the Defense Department say? And three or four weeks later, Johnson came back and said, this is the thing we ought to do. And everybody agrees that we have a 50-50 chance of making it by the end of the decade. Kennedy actually wanted to say 1967 and they were going to do it by 1967 and the

NASA people could barely catch their breath with the speed they needed to correct him because they said, sir, you don't understand. If everything goes perfectly, we can do it by 1967, but part of a project like this is that you have to plan that things aren't going to go well, that there are going to be things

you don't understand that go wrong. Please don't say 1967. So he made it by the end of the decade. Kennedy actually came up with that phrase himself. And NASA said there's a 50-50 chance we can do it by then. And I think what they meant was that they would have solved all the problems by then, but that you don't, in an engineering project, you don't actually know whether everything's going to come together perfectly,

you know, one flight after another, which, by the way, it did. But even NASA was surprised at that. if we jump all the way forward to 1968, 1968, 1969. What Kennedy knew, and I think this is important, it's an important lesson for all of us to take, but not to overinterpret. What Kennedy knew was that announcing the goal, announcing the mission and the reason for it, the sense of urgency behind it, that dramatically shifted the odds. The moment he said, we need to do this, we can do it. This is what America is about. reaching for something that is out of reach and making it possible, that changed the odds in favor of success.

It didn't change them from 50-50 to 99.9 to 0.1, but just saying to people, we need to do this immediately sends people, you know, racing for the goal. Now, that said, when he said, let's go to the moon, whatever, the top hundred people at NASA knew this was coming, the people, the 20,000 people who worked for that top 100 people didn't know it was coming. They were as surprised as anybody. And it was impossible. It could not, at that moment, it couldn't be done. That's what I think we, as leaders we can draw. We're not doing it because it's easy, but because it's hard. And that's what we strive to do. And I speak of this phrase called voluntary hardship, meaning even if you do have things, well, put little signals and markers

in your life that are harder. So, for example, if you're at the airport as I was yesterday and there's an escalator, but there's also stairs next to the escalator, let's voluntarily choose the harder option to better prepare us for the future. So it wasn't just about going to the moon and coming back. I know it's a tiny example and it's funny, but it's true because it's a little reminder for me, like we choose to do hard things. I'm laughing because I take the stairs that I have elderly parents. And so I take the stairs as a kind of blessing, as a moment of gratitude. I can take the stairs.

And I'm going to take them as long as I can take them because one day I'll have to use the escalator. Right. So, well, another great way to have a viewpoint of gratitude, a living a life of being grateful, which I think is another aspect of to it. But from a leadership perspective, thinking of that person who's a mid-level manager now, Charles, and they are trying to build a team to do, to produce something at an excellent level, not to send somebody to the moon, but to perform at a high level for their company, for their business, and that they choose to do something hard.

What was that significance or what did that mean when he said that specific statement to us, to tell us as a nation of what we're looking to do? Right. So I think there's two pieces here that it's good to tease out. What we don't need, and we've all worked for people like this, we don't need crazy leaders who say, I know it's impossible, just make it possible. That's not what John Kennedy was doing. This was carefully thought out. Kennedy himself did not have hours and hours and hours of meetings about this, but LBJ had days and days and days of meetings. where he asked what would happen next and what would happen next and what if that doesn't work. And he came to the conclusion that it was possible. He didn't just have somebody say, well, the way to leapfrog the Soviets is to go to the moon and then everybody's eyes lit up and said, what a genius idea. In fact, Donald Rumsfeld was then the Defense Secretary of the United States in a blast

from the past and a connection to the present. And Rumsfeld said, going to the moon is not enough. We should go to Mars. And the people at NASA said, no one's going to Mars in the 1960s or the 1970s, sir, with all respect, it's not the same problem. And to Rumsfeld, it was just like, well, if you can say we're going to go to the moon, let's pick something harder that we know they can't do it and go to Mars. Well, the moon is two and a half days away. Mars is three and a half months away, and you can't talk to the people when they're flying to Mars because the distance is so far that the radio signals take many minutes to travel. And so what we don't need people to say is let's just pick a really hard thing and drive everybody insane, but if we do it, it'll be genius.

This was a master stroke of leadership because it was a stretch goal, but also because because. people Kennedy trusted had assured themselves that it was, in fact, possible. It was not pure insanity. And so that's important. What Kennedy was saying that I think is really valuable, so the speech he gave a year later, a year and three months later at Rice University was the speech in which he said, we choose to go to the moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard and because it will call out. the best of us and organize us in a way that shows exactly what we can do. He was really speaking to the American character there. He was saying, we like to do hard things. We don't take the easy course. This is the nation that settled a continent, that built the Panama Canal, that built

the transcontinental railroad. We never say, oh, that looks too hard. let's wait to invent the airplane to go to California. And so I think the most important thing there is to have a balance between what is a stretch goal, but what is possible with the talent you've got and the capabilities you've got and what's just going to run everybody into the ground. And part of leadership is understanding the difference. Yeah, I envision that as perhaps another analysis.

Like I spoke with my friend James Clearer who wrote the best seller called Atomic Habits and he said, if you're going to try to get better at tennis, you wouldn't go and play against a four-year-old, but you also wouldn't go and play against Roger Federer. Four-year-old would be too easy and Federer would just blow you out of the water that there would be no improvement. You would play someone who is slightly better than you or a little bit, a little bit better than that. So that it's a stretch, but that forces you to improve and get better and better. So as a leader, our takeaway there is we constantly want to set stretch goals. However, we don't want to set insane goals.

I've worked in organizations that have set insane goals. And you know what happens? People quit. They leave. They go somewhere else. If this wasn't possible from getting to the moon standpoint, at least the vision of, is this actually doable? Like you said, all those meetings that were taking place that we didn't see, then it would have been insane to announce it.

Right, right. And this falls slightly on the, on the spectrum, toward the more insane. There were literally 10,000 problems that had to be solved to get to the moon. And we didn't know what 5,000 of them were, right? Five thousand of those problems didn't appear until we tried to solve the first 5,000. But, and this is not to diminish the professions of science and engineering. They were all engineering. engineering problems. They were not, they weren't human systems problems, right? If you, if you look at a high school filled with faculty and students that isn't quite performing the way it should be, you know, given everything that's available or the way you want it to be, that's a, that's a whole group of human beings. And you can't simply set, you know, a set of standards, performance standards, and make them hit them. Engineering problems are a little different in that once you've figured out how to fly to the moon, every spaceship with the same equipment and the same rocket thrust and the same course performs the same way. You wake up tomorrow, the high school

whose problems you helped solve yesterday may have some new problems and it may not function the way you were hoping even though you fix those problems. So engineering problems do lend themselves to being solved, which is important, but we didn't have any rockets. We didn't have any spaceships. We didn't have spacesuits. There was an argument, the day that Kennedy gave his speech, there was an argument about whether human beings

would be able to think in space, whether your brain would work in zero gravity. It seems a little silly now, but that's how that's not a sign of silliness. That's a sign of, let's put all the problems on the table. And by the way, we don't know a lot about this.

And so, so it was definitely a stretch. It's interesting because we have tape recordings of Kennedy in his office talking to people from NASA two long meetings in 62 and 63. And Kennedy was really smart. It is fun to listen to him, dig in to the policy and the politics, but he did not understand scientific discovery. The first of those meetings is about whether to get NASA half a billion dollars. $500 million extra very quickly in the moment they were talking about in the next month or two. And there were nine NASA officials in the cabinet room with the president.

And he kept saying, I can get you the money. Why can't you make things go faster if I give you $500 billion? And they kept saying, Mr. President, this kind of exploration doesn't work that way. We still have to follow the steps and see what happens. And you giving us lots more money today, might. move things forward three years from now by a month or two, but maybe won't make any difference at all. This is a moment where the right amount of money is what we need and just pouring more money in isn't going to make us go faster. And so he actually never did quite understand in that meeting

what they were talking about. There was a real failure of communication there. You can listen to it for 45 minutes. It will it will make you close your eyes. But it is a reminder that leadership also involves having people you have confidence in. And even if you don't quite understand, Kennedy just eventually gets up and says, okay, you don't want the money. I get that. Please go as fast as you can. I got to go do the next meeting.

One of the other things you've written about is that the space program created a culture of learning from failure. Because in space, any and every failure, could equal a tragic disaster, death. On Earth, these could become gifts to us. And one of the things you wrote about with Grumman, the company that designed it built the lunar modules, which is they really showcase them well in the HBO show

from Earth to the Moon, they said that every single failure of every single component had to be investigated, understood, and resolved. Talked, can you share more about, how one, this program helped us create a culture of learning from failure and then extend on that to how this could be related to today's work, to the business world for somebody who's leading a team today. So the Grumman built the lunar module and the lunar module was remains, was and remains a very unusual kind of flying craft. It was never flown on Earth. It could only be flown in space, which means that the first time you got to fly it, you were flying

an actual lunar module in a moment when you needed it to work perfectly. Grumman was historically an aircraft company, and you tested aircraft over and over and over again. You built it. You equipped it. You thought you had designed it right. Then you went to a runway, you took off and you just circled around once and landed and said, how'd that go? What worked? What didn't work? And over and over again, you know, longer flights, you know, more pressure, more performance. You couldn't do that with the lunar module. That made

everybody a little insane because you're making, I'm calling it an aircraft, but you're making a spacecraft that the people who are going to use it, they can never test it. And you as the manufacturer can never test it. Did we get this design right? Is this going to work the way we expect? Imagine the mistakes you can make on Earth with an airplane and all the experience we've had with airplanes. They're making the first spacecraft to ever fly in space, but not in an atmosphere, and they can't test it. In fact, the engines for that spacecraft, the rocket engines, could be tested, but once you tested them, you were done. That engine, you were testing that. That engine, you were testing that particular engine, but then that engine couldn't fly. So they sort of were in a box. The batteries

were the same way. The batteries were, it's a small thing, but the batteries that powered the lunar module were non-rechargeable. So once you tested a battery to see if it worked, if it worked, hey, great, thumbs up. Unfortunately, that didn't do you any good because you couldn't use that battery to fly to the moon. So they had to develop all kinds of new techniques. The batteries are a small thing, there they ordered, you know, they ordered eight times the number of batteries they needed. They tested three of the eight. And if the batch worked, then they picked, you know, a flight battery from the remaining five at random. That sort of was a new way of thinking about it. A lot of computer simulation so that people, even in 1967, 68, and 69, kind of quote unquote

learned to fly the lunar module before they were in it. But the other thing was that they created an entire culture across the company called no random failures. Every failure has meaning. We're testing everything. And any fail, don't, don't shrug and say, well, that's not that big a deal. Every single failure must be investigated and understood. And this, this turned out to be vitally important. The combined spaceship, the command module, the service module, and the lunar module all together had 71 high pressure tanks in them, containing oxygen, fuel, all kinds of super-cooled liquids for flying to the moon. In testing, one of those tanks for the lunar module, a super-cooled helium tank failed. It exploded at the seam. It was a tank that looked a little like a standard,

propane tank that we use with the grill with the top half and a bottom half and a seam in the middle. It was capable of keeping liquids at minus 400 degrees, though, so not your typical propane tank. And they dug in and tried to understand what had happened. And NASA required every piece of raw material to be traceable, literally back to the mine where the raw material had come from. And they couldn't figure out why this tank had failed. The weld material was good. The tank material was good.

Other tanks had been made with that and not failed. So the manager at this company, Air Research, sort of took a step back, dug in and did a complete analysis of how that tank was made. Here's what he discovered. The halves of the tank along the edge that was going to be welded were wiped with a cloth before they were welded together. This was the first tank in which the cloth. The wiping cloths had been previously used for that task.

And then instead of being thrown away, they'd been laundered and reused. Somebody said, wow, we're spending $20 billion. Let's save a little money and not throw the cloths away after one. Crazy, but, you know, an admirable moment. It turns out that when you wash a wiping cloth and then dry it, a little bit of laundry detergent remains in the cloth. the laundry detergent they were using was corrosive to titanium. A few molecules of laundry detergent remained on the halves of the tank.

And then when the welding material, which was titanium, was used, those molecules caused weak points in the weld, and then the tank exploded. So imagine the kind of questions you had to ask about the procedure of this tank versus every other tank to get somebody to say, oh, boss, yes, by the way, this was the one where we started laundering the wiping cloths, right? Wiping cloths weren't even, like, you wouldn't even imagine them as indispensable to the process. But if they hadn't figured that out and one of those tanks had exploded either on the way to the moon or at the moon, you would have certainly doomed the mission and you might have

have doomed the people. And so this, this culture of there's no random failures. Every failure is a gift here on earth. If we can understand it, we can avoid a problem later on. That culture was insane. It required a certain level of real detail. But every single time you came to the answer, you thought, okay, I'm glad I did that. That was really worth it. And so there were 14,000 recorded failures, only 22 of them went unexplained in the end, only 22. Wow. So the phrase that keeps jumping to my mind throughout the course of our conversation about sending somebody to the moon and having them return safely to Earth is collaboration. There is 400,000 people working to make this happen.

And initially, I believe the budget for NASA when Kennedy, before he made the announcement, was $1 million per year on the program. And five years later, they were spending $1 million every three hours in Apollo, seven days a week. There are leaders in businesses that are having to work across business units that need effective collaboration in order to make their business grow, succeed, improve, hit the goals that are set. What are the takeaways from a collaboration standpoint that that person who's listening right now can take from the 400,000 some people that had to put this all together to send somebody to the moon and back safely? Yeah, I mean, that really is both the $64,000 question and kind of a little bit of the magic of Apollo. How did they keep people aligned?

There were 400,000 people working at 20,000 companies. Think about that for a minute, 20,000 companies who had to work together, right? You couldn't have a tantrum and say, my connector is going to be flat, even though the place I'm plugging it into on your spaceship is going to be round. If I like flat better, it all had to work. Of the 40,000, about, I'm sorry, of the 400,000. about 35,000 were NASA people and 365,000 worked at companies or universities, were contractors. So NASA managed, but NASA didn't overmanage. NASA's management style here, which is a gift, it's not a, it's, it's not like you can

write three cool sentences down and do what NASA did. the most impressive thing is how much work it required, but you're talking about one to 10 in terms of people. What NASA did was say, your job is to make spacesuits. Your job is to make a lunar module. Here's what we need the spacesuits to do. Now, don't build a spacesuit yet, but come back and show us what your solution to the problems is. And then we're going to go through that solution with you. We know what we're doing.

We've got a spacesuit person over. here, you've got 30 spacesuit people, we've got one, but we're going to ask a lot of hard questions, then we're going to agree on the spacesuit design, and then you're going to go do it. So NASA did not in any way micromanage these programs, but there were moments when NASA stepped in and said, no, that's not going to be a solution that works from our perspective. Here's why, but even if you disagree, you're going to have to pick a different solution. But in general, NASA gave people an assignment and a set of qualities of characteristics that had to be met. They didn't care whether the spacesuits were white or not, but they had to protect astronauts when the temperature was minus 200 degrees and plus 200 degrees.

If you wanted to make them white, and that was important to you, great. NASA wasn't in the micromanagement business. And then NASA had this real culture. which was very interesting in the pre-internet era, in the pre-email era, in the pre-Slaq channel era, NASA brought everybody together on a regular basis in meetings, in-person meetings. And there were a set of these, especially in 1967, 1968 forward, where every minute of a mission would be walked through. And everybody would know at that minute what everything was supposed to be doing. And if there were problems as they were like, okay, we haven't resolved how this is going to work,

then the person running the meeting would say, okay, you've got everybody in the room right now you need from every company and from NASA. You go over there for two hours and solve that problem and come back and tell us what the solution is. And as they would walk through these meetings, the person in charge from NASA would literally make decisions. take all the input, have a conversation, listen to the dissenters, and then say, this is what we're going to do. And I was very impressed. As far as I know, there's no tapes of even any of those meetings, but there were lots of them. And it was a way of both collaborating and then coming to decisions where everybody understood both what the decision was and what the basis of the decision.

was. And so NASA tried to be, I think, transparent, but also decisive. And it gave people plenty of leash as long as they didn't screw up. And we can tell the story of MIT and the computer if you want and what it looked like when people didn't weren't successful at collaborating and how NASA yanked them back. But the general, the general format was make clear what the assignment is and then bring everybody together and make sure everything worked. And NASA simply didn't tolerate primadonna's. If NASA needed to bang heads to make sure that the connector was round instead of flat, they didn't hesitate to do that.

So I think the takeaway the learning for today's leader is one, there's power in getting people together. So bringing people together. it is our job as leaders to be vividly clear in our messaging and our expectations. It is worth it to empower and give ownership to the people that you trust to do their job. And if for some reason they don't do their job, then you perhaps will make changes. And then that leads me to the story that you just mentioned that you could potentially share about the MIT guys. So can you take it from here? Sure.

And putting all that stuff in writing is not a bad idea. Yep. That helps with people being clear. And by the way, getting people together in person, and I think we all sort of know this in our hearts, is inconvenient, but it's a lot less inconvenient than failing. And getting people together on a Slack channel is not the same as putting 60 people in a room and spending eight hours getting a decision from it. Real quick on that. because I've actually worked at places where we stopped getting everyone together in person. And the reason was obvious it was because it was really expensive and inconvenient and it took

people out from where they were working because there's a company that were all over the country, all over North America. And stopped doing that for cost and inconvenience. But I will tell you living through that. The culture changed and not for the better. And so anyone listening who has the power to get your people together or not, I am a firm believer that it is worth whatever it costs, the millions of dollars that it may cost to bring your people together to build culture,

camaraderie, the informal meeting in the hallway, chats. All of those things are important to build a culture, at a place that you want to do something excellent. Not necessarily putting somebody in the moon, but growing, exceeding expectations, adhering to excellence. That stuff, the little things are so important. And it's not just looking at the Excel spreadsheet

and seeing, oh, this could save us $5 million. Let's not do it. It's not about that. So there's so much more to that, that little detail of getting your people together to build the type of culture that's going to do something excellent. Well, and just to reinforce that, one of the one thing that was very true of NASA was that when they got people together, they were aiming to do something with those people.

Yes. It was not, it was not quote unquote culture building. They built a culture by getting people from different companies, different organizations, NASA itself, who didn't always sit in the same room together and then running down the 20 decisions or the 20 choices. that needed to be made. And they built a sense of camaraderie there, but it wasn't a team-building exercise. It was they got people together because there was work to do.

And I think sometimes we're a little muddled about what the point, I wouldn't fly everybody to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and then expect to have great culture. What NASA was doing was saying, this is too important to do over the telephone, but when we get together, we're going to really talk it through, bang some heads, have an argument, make a decision, and do the next one after that.

Certainly. I think that that, I'm glad you brought it up. I assumed that, but we should assume nothing. It absolutely have a specific plan in place for what you will do when you are together. So it's not a waste of time and money. But I 100% agree. So, okay, let's get to MIT guys. So MIT was chosen to design the computer that would fly to the moon and program it.

They were the first Apollo contractor of any kind. They were chosen about 10 weeks after Kennedy said, let's go to the moon. Before the spaceship was designed, before the lunar module was designed, before there was space suits or moon food or anything, they picked MIT to do the computer because they knew that the navigation and the computer would be among the hardest things. The smallest computers at that moment were the size of four big refrigerators lined up together. you couldn't send even one refrigerator to the moon. You needed something that was the size of a suitcase. And MIT was the only place that could probably get that done in eight years. And in fact, MIT did a brilliant job of designing the computer and then supervising its creation. That's a whole amazing story all its own. That computer laid the foundation for your laptop and your iPhone. Apollo was really important. MIT also wrote the programs. That computer only

had 73KB of memory total. You heard me right. Very little memory. It had less memory than your microwave oven. And so you needed to use the computing power you had literally in the smartest possible ways. MIT wrote the programs to fly to the moon. And in the middle of 1966, they had written 40% more software than would fit in the computer. MIT, so so MIT, So MIT started out as the place that was going to get us to the moon with their sort of digital genius. In the middle of 1966, deep inside NASA, the senior leadership was very worried that MIT would be the reason we didn't make it to the moon by the end of the decade because you could not simply go buy another hard drive. There were no hard drives. You couldn't make the memory on that computer any bigger than it already was.

In fact, it was 50% bigger than MIT had originally hoped it would be. and they'd still written 40% more software. And MIT didn't seem worried about this, which was really frustrating for NASA. And so NASA sent a guy named Bill Tyndall, a senior official from Houston, from mission control up to Cambridge. And Bill Tyndall started going to Cambridge on Monday

and staying until Thursday and then coming home and flying back on Monday. Bill Tyndall was in charge of what was called mission planning. He was a big boss. He was also, a genius. He understood space navigation, perhaps better than anyone else in the country, as well, certainly, as the people programming the computer at MIT. But Bill Tyndall was also a gracious, self-effacing, funny guy. He was a beautiful writer, and he wrote memos several

a week that ended up being called Tindelgrams about what was happening in Apollo, sort of pulling everybody in the same direction. Here's what I learned yesterday. We had an all hands meeting yesterday. Here's what we concluded. Here's three problems we haven't solved. Who's solving them? Let's step up and solve them. They actually have the air of beautiful emails that you would get today.

But of course, they had to be dictated and typed and distributed on paper. They were so powerful and so compelling that everybody important in the organization read them, the astronauts read them. They wanted to know what the status of their spaceships was. Bill Tyndall's first sort of impact at MIT was, who's this guy from the customer coming up telling us what to do? Like, we know what to do. Who's Bill Tyndall to tell us what to do? He got a fair amount of resistance.

Fairly early on, within a couple months, he had a big all-hands meeting on a Friday. It's still known at MIT as Black Friday. And he sat everybody down, a bunch of people from NASA, everybody from MIT. And he said, today we're going to start cutting these programs. going to cut out, not only we're going to cut out 40% that we need, we're going to cut a little more than 40% because you and I both know there are things you haven't thought of that we're going to need to do. And it was an extraordinary experience that actually lasted two days. The guys who had written these beautiful space navigation programs just were, it was like cutting off

their left arm. But it had to be done. And Bill Tyndall knew enough about the computer and the programming and flying in space that he could say, well, obviously that run, that little piece of programming right there is not, in fact, necessary to fly to the moon. He called it icing the cake, frosting the cake. He said, that's beautiful. And I love that. But we don't need it. And so if we keep it, then we don't get to go at all. So we're not keeping it. At one point, there was actually a rebellion from the folks at MIT. They, the, whatever, the 20 senior most folks, there were hundreds of people MIT working on flying to the moon. The 20 senior most people met in the office of one of them and the big boss, the guy in charge named Charles Stark Draper, Doc Draper came. He invented space

navigation and he listened to them complain. They were like, who is this guy to tell us what to do? He's the customer. Come on. We're MIT. We know what we're doing. And he said, he had signed MIT up to do this. And he said, well, he said, I hear you. That sounds really unpleasant having some guy come in from you know Texas to tell us up here in Cambridge how to do it maybe maybe we shouldn't be doing this you know if you want me to call up the head of NASA Jim Webb and say we're out we can't we can't do it okay I'll do that then you know if that's what you if you all think you can't do it okay and it was it was literally the master stroke because they of course all looked at him and said of course we can do it that's not what we're complaining about and

And Dr. Draper just shrugged and said, okay, well, if you can do it, then you figure out how to manage Tyndall. And it took a year for NASA and MIT for Tyndall and the people in charge of the software to figure out how to fix it. To be honest, it's a sad thing to say, but MIT was rescued by the disastrous Apollo one fire that killed the first three Apollo astronauts and postponed the program for a year. That created the space, unfortunately, but also fortunately, to make sure everything was right. And when you talk to those MIT people now, there's my favorite moment early on. Tyndall records all this. You can read it in his memos. He says, so I took the IBM guy up to Cambridge with me this time who designed the IBM computers for Mission Control. Because really,

these MIT people, they got no documentation, they got no records of what they're doing. They explain why this line is different in this program than the last program. We need all this stuff traceable. I'm going to bring my MIT buddy with me. And I think the MIT buddy can really teach them a lot. I can just imagine the guys at MIT rolling. Here comes Mr. IBM to tell us how to do it. But those guys will tell you now two things. The first thing I tell you is Bill Tyndall saved us. He saved MIT and he saved Apollo. We would never have gotten our act together if he hadn't come and sort of grabbed us by the scruff of the neck and said, you guys are screwing up. And we aren't going to get to the moon if we keep playing ball this way.

And so they credit him now. They don't resent him. It took a little while, but he kind of toughed it out. The other thing they will tell you is that his manner, A, he was an expert. He knew everything they knew and more. so he had credibility and B, he had a gracious manner. He didn't come up and act like he knew everything they knew and more. He came up with a sense of respect for what they had done, but a larger sense of respect for the mission.

And he pulled them along, but also he wasn't disrespectful. He wasn't dismissive. He was himself not arrogant, even in the face of their arrogance. He had the confidence to be calm, well-mannered, very funny guy, used humor very effectively. And what those guys will tell you at MIT, men and women, is that a different person sent from Houston, a different NASA official who made exactly the same decision at every point, but had a different manner, would have been a disaster.

That not only was Tyndall the right guy because he knew how to make decisions crisply, absorb a lot of information and pick the right path, He also did it in such a way that people felt like they had been listened to. Their concerns had been taken into consideration. He wasn't making decisions dismissively. He was making them because he had to. And they will tell you that his manner was half the battle. A different person making exactly the same decisions with a different style would have been

disaster. And so that was really interesting to me because you don't pick the leader who's just going to make the right decision. You have to pick the leader who's going to pull people along, especially in tough times, with decisions that aren't always going to be fun. It's a great takeaway for us that it's not enough to just be a genius or to be an expert, but be somebody who is pleasant to be around, who others want to work with. Be a decent person, I think, is the basis. and I was reading some Tendelgrams. And one of his ones, to illustrate some of his humor, it's from June 13th, 1966, one of his

tendograms. Well, I just got back from MIT with my weekly quota of new ulcers, which I thought might interest you, unquote. Just great stuff like that. But then you look at a quote from flight director, Gene Kranz. And Gene Kranz has been spoken about on this podcast during my conversation with Professor Mike Yusim. Gene Cran said of Tendell, if there should have been a lunar plaque left on the moon from somebody in mission control or flight control, it should have been for Bill Tendell.

Tendell was the guy who put all the pieces together and all we did is execute them. Pretty big words for one person out of those 400,000 that we're working to make this happen. Well, and so two things are really important from what you just said. First, I would go a little further. It's not enough to be right. people have to still be persuaded to follow you. Being right isn't enough. And the second thing is you couldn't find two more different people than Gene Cranz and Bill Tindle in terms of leadership style.

Gene Cranz is the sort of the bullheaded master sergeant, you know, who is right and is kind of pushing people beyond their limits but not afraid to raise his voice. Bill Tyndall was a genius at the same level, but with a very different style in that same environment of layered complexity. Chris Kraft picked Gene Kranz to run mission control, and Chris Kraft picked Bill Tyndall to go to MIT. He didn't, not that he would have, but he didn't pick Gene Kranz because Gene Kranz would have blown up MIT and blown up Houston at the same time. picked the right person. And so, right, it's, it's people are different kinds of leaders and the, the choice actually matters. Just picking the person who's going to make the right decisions doesn't solve the problem if they're not going to get people. The people at MIT talk about Black Friday. They talk about about Bill Tyndall cutting their programs 50 years later, just like it.

happened yesterday. Oh my God, it was such a beautiful piece of code. And he said we had to not use it. And I was so disappointed. But I understood that he understood what he did. And he also understood we had to go to the moon. And so that's important. What that tells me is you've got to be authentic. Gene Kranz was who he was, his authentic self, Bill Tindle was who he was, Chris Kraft was who he was. Obviously, ultimate leadership is picking the right people and putting him in the right positions, which Chris Kraft did. But they were authentic. They're secure in oneself. They have a comfort in their own skin, a high level of self and spatial awareness, high level of emotional intelligence.

All these things super important when it comes to leadership. It doesn't mean you have to be like Gene Kranz and the ballbuster who's going to crush you. Or you don't have to be like Bill Tyndall with the humor. You have to be true to yourself and find how you figure out your own leadership style within your person. So that it's genuine, real, authentic because nobody follows phonies. Nobody. You figure it out pretty quick and it doesn't work. You can't, I use the phrase the beginning of this conversation, sustaining excellence.

It is not sustainable if you're a phony. You've got to lean into your own natural personality and make it work from there as we're doing this. We're listening to podcasts, reading books, trying to improve and get better. Don't try to be Jean Kranz or Bill Tendell. But learn from Gene and learn from Bill how you could apply. bits and pieces from the way they led into your personality so that you can be your authentic self. Ryan, that's great. And you started out asking what are the similarities in leaders?

And I would say, just listening to you talk and the stories we've talked about today, both Gene Kranz and Bill Tyndall were not only unafraid to hear what people had to say. they understood how important it was, right? They understood Bill Tyndall didn't, was smart enough to understand everything there was to understand, but didn't assume that he knew everything. He was unafraid to hear everybody's input and dissent and argument and persuasion on their, on behalf of their own point of view, but also confident enough to make the right decision. but not listening is the path to not getting where you're going.

You can't be afraid to listen, but you also have to know the moment. And both Tyndall and Cranes were good at this when it's time to stop talking about it and make a decision. All right. We might have to have a round two at some point. But I did want to ask you to kind of wrap this thing up. It's been 50 years. We haven't been back to the moon. We're not to Mars yet.

There was a extremely high. high level of competition going on 50 years ago prior to that, 60 years ago, really, when JFK made this announcement. And I've heard the phrase competition breeds excellence. And right now, perhaps there isn't competition. Or maybe the only competition is between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson. I'm curious from your perspective, looking forward. One, are we going to go back to the moon?

or why haven't we? Are we going to get to Mars or why haven't we yet? What's the plan? And why have we not progressed much, at least in space, from 50 years ago? So we went to the moon mostly for political and then scientific reasons. We weren't going to the moon for economic reasons. If you compare Armstrong and Aldrin and the 10 guys who landed on the moon after them, the six successful missions, 18 astronauts, 12 of whom walked on the moon. If you compare them to Lewis and Clark, well, Lewis and Clark were on an exploration mission of half a continent, but they were on an economic mission. They were exploring the quote-unquote Louisiana Purchase, all the territory west of the

Mississippi River, not just with an eye to sort of documenting it and reporting back. the cool stuff they found, they were exploring it with an eye to opening it up to settlement and exploitation. There's no economic system that requires us or even invites us to go to the moon and get resources. Anything you can get on the moon is much easier to get on Earth. And so going to the moon now, going to the moon any time since we went and now, there has to be a different reason than economics to get you there. And if there's a different reason, then it's going to require government funding or funding from venture capitalists. To me, what's exciting about space now, I think we're actually entering the most exciting period in space exploration

since the 60s, when this stuff really lit people up. But what's exciting is just what you said, is what's happening right here nearby with Elon Musk and SpaceX and Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin, a guy named Robert Bigelow and Bigelow Aerospace. Musk and Bezos want to change the economics of going to space. They want to create what I think of as the Southwest Airlines of space travel. And I say that with all respect. They want space travel to be safe, reliable, and inexpensive. They are trying to take what cost $100 million.

five years ago and make it cost a million dollars five years or ten years from now. If they can do that, if they can reduce the cost of flying into space by 99 percent, and it looks like both of them will be able to do it in their own slightly different way, you're going to create a space economy. People are going to want to go to space and try out all kinds of things, just like when we stepped into the world of high-speed data and the internet. When Steve Jobs stepped on stage 12 years ago with the iPhone, none of the stories the next day talked about how the iPhone would revolutionize traffic management in America. But it turns out that if you put a smartphone in the pocket of every single driver, all of a sudden you understand traffic patterns in a way you didn't before.

When we start sending people to space at a million bucks to throw instead of 100 million, all kinds of things are going to be unleashed. Robert Bigelow and Bigelow Aerospace, he's ready to put up space habitats that have been tested on the International Space Station. He just needs customers. If you want a lab, Robert Bigelow is ready. If you want a little hotel, Robert Bigelow is ready. He just needs customers. And he doesn't have any customers because right now there's no way to go.

So if Bezos and Musk and Bigelow can get going, we will end up with a completely different kind of space race which is one that's economically sustainable, one that's driven by innovation and frankly by the hope of making money. I think that's going to allow anybody who's sort of in high school and younger, high school and college right now, if they want to do a stint in space 15 years from now with their company, the way you go to Shanghai or Delhi or London, if they want to do their PhD research in space, I think that's all going to be available. I think going to be available. I think going back to the moon and going to Mars, those still fall into the category of programs that are really stretch programs that are going to need to be government funded. And to be honest, people talk about going to the Mars like it was going to Mars like it was not that different than going to the moon.

But it's really very, very different. It's a different order of magnitude. And I think that's really a coalition effort. I think we need, you know, four or five or six countries to say, this is something that's really going to be worthwhile. Just like going to the moon in the 1960s, we can't tell you all the ways it's going to be worthwhile. But achieving putting human beings on Mars is such a daunting task that if we can accomplish it, we will reap all kinds of benefits. But it's not going to be the kind of thing. I don't think that one nation is going to do alone.

I think the United States should lead the effort, but we should be really clear that it's an investment, not something we're going to get a payoff from. So I put that in a different category. The space age is coming, and it's going to happen in the next 10 years right nearby. And that's not going to make it less thrilling. So cool. Charles, like I said, I could talk to you forever, man. I really appreciate it. I love the storytelling and the passion you have for it. There's so much more to get to, but let's schedule to do it again.

And the book is called, most recent book is called One Giant Leap, the Impossible Mission that flew us to the moon. I absolutely appreciate you being here. Where would you send my listeners to learn more about you online? Your listeners can look up. I did a series for Fast Company magazine, which is kind of my professional home these days, called 50 Days to the Moon. If they just Google Charles Fishman and 50 Days to the Moon, they will find 50 stories. I told 50 stories like this in 50 days, one after another,

from June 1 to the moon landing anniversary, July 20th. And those stories are a little taste. Some of them are in the book. Probably half of them are not in the book. A little taste of what it was like. And, you know, as you said, the book is really a book about leadership. And there are individuals just like Bill Tyndel profiled in the book. How does one person have an impact?

on a mission this big, well, you know what? At every single stage, individual people had an impact. And it's kind of fun and thrilling to read those stories and be reminded no matter what you're doing, you too can have that kind of impact on shaping what happens. Absolutely. All right. Thanks so much, Charles. I certainly want to continue our dialogue as we both progress, man. All right. Thanks for having me, Ryan. This was so much fun. All right. Thanks, man. Wow. I love the passion. that Charles has for this topic. It is evident that he is following his genuine curiosity and obsessions with great rigor

and tells the stories with so much energy. It's contagious. I absolutely love a few of the areas that jumped out to me. The JFK speech, we choose to go to the moon in this decade, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills. because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept and unwilling to postpone.

So good. Then the collaborative effort, 400,000 people from 20,000 companies and bringing your team together in person. Why NASA felt that was a good use of time and money. We can all learn from that. And then the leadership styles of Jean Krantz and Bill Tyndall, two dramatically different styles,

yet both incredibly effective. It shows that it's important to be authentically you, true to yourself. No facade, not being fake, but being real, and then finding how you can improve yourself within the personality that you have to grow, improve, strive to get better. But never be fake in your desire to lead others. And people will see that. Be comfortable in your own skin based on everything that you've done.

This one was so good. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. If so, I would love it if you would tell a friend or two. The best form of marketing is word of mouth. It continues to give me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so much. Talk with you next week.

Can't wait? Okay. Thank you so much, man. I really appreciate it. I really mean, I have pages and notes that we didn't even get to, but I appreciate your passion you have for this stuff. It's like no joke. It's cool when you can see, I mean, obviously, even the book, it's not a thin book. There's a lot there. And I know from writing a book that the process that you probably had to cut a ton as well, that you love this stuff. And that's exciting for me to hear

about somebody who's passionate about the topic that they get to study on a regular basis. Well, I appreciate it. You ask great questions. And I've been interviewed a lot. People are often not listening to the, they're thinking about the next question rather than listening to the answer. So let's see what the reaction is. If you want to exit, I mean, there's this incredible story of the two guys who made sure we had a car on the moon and they are just, they are just hysterical. Just two GM engineers who said, there's got to be a car on the moon and it's got to be a GM car. Let's figure out how to make it happen. And so. Yeah, we get electric cars on the moon before we get on the moon. It's good stuff. All right, fine. It's a pleasure to

meet you. If I can be of help, let me know. If people come back to you and want to be in touch, you can give them my email address. I'm not hard to find out there anyway. Cool. Yeah. And I'll make sure once we get this one edited and put together and we publish it, I'll make sure to shoot you over a link. So this won't land this Friday. It's for some future Friday. Sundays, but yes. I'm sorry, Sunday. It'll probably be within a few weeks. Two to four. I'm not 100% sure yet. But yeah, it'll be, it'll be, we made an evergreen conversation, which I tried to do, meaning it could land anytime. And because people come back and listen for years.

So I try to do that and you made it pretty easy. But yeah, it'll probably be within a few weeks. Okay, very good. Thank you, sir. A pleasure. Thanks, man. Okay. Take care.

Bye-bye.