I have always been fascinated with what makes a situation, person, or event succeed or fail. The psychology of it fascinates me. I studied psychology as an undergrad and in graduate school, but it wasn’t until I read The Tipping Point by Malcome Gladwell that I really became hooked on social psychology and specifically the power that people have to make an impact or be change agents.

Gladwell starts his book with a description of the successful come back of Hush Puppies. Yes, it is true Hush Puppies weren’t always popular and the brushed suede shoe line was down to 30,000 pairs per year in 1994. Then people started showing up in the trendy clubs and bars in Manhattan and it was on. People bought up the shoes from anywhere they could. Issac Mizrahi (before he was so famous and designed for Target) was wearing them, another designer wanted them for spring fashion shoot, someone created Hush Puppy boutique, as so on and so on. By the end of 1995, they had sold 430,000 pairs. Word of mouth drove the demand and ultimately the supply. Amazing!

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I knew that I was joining a special group of people when I became a contributing author here because of the passion everyone has shown for making NASA the kind of organization we all know it can be.  I consider myself fortunate to be in the company of such a group.

I have learned a heck of a lot in a relatively short period of time about the various perspectives that people bring to the table from all over the space exploration community.  I expected and hoped that would happen, though.  What I didn’t expect was that participating in this electronic forum would lead to even wider, once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.

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You may have heard the buzz about the @MarsPhoenix twitter phenomenon. @MarsPhoenix has become extremely popular with an online audience of 20,000+. What makes @MarsPhoenix particularly engaging is its stream of regular first-person updates about life as a spacecraft on Mars. One of my personal favorite updates so far is this one:

“I know it LOOKS easy, but you try following instructions sent from 182 million miles away!”

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Here’s a Quick Quiz … what Gen Y’r wrote these words:”Come mothers and fathersThroughout the landAnd don’t criticizeWhat you can’t understandYour sons and your daughtersAre beyond your commandYour old road isRapidly agin’.Please get out of the new oneIf you can’t lend your hand … “For those of you who don’t know, three clues:

• This artist was born in Duluth, Minnesota
• This artist won a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation in April 2008 for “profound impact on popular music and American culture … “
• I left off the last line because it could be a giveaway

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I’ve had a couple of conversations (relative to a couple of different projects) over the past week or two around how open we should really be with our day to day work.  The discussion really centered around Twitter and whether or not someone like me should write job-related stuff like “oh no, my mission’s going to crash into the moon because I screwed up the calculation” when I screw something up.

 The concern was that if the public sees such comments about how often stuff gets screwed up, that they’ll want to take all of our money away because we seem like a bunch of idiots.  The flip side is that if we’re really open and honest about how close we are to failure every day and how incredible it is that people find the errors that they do, then the general public will gain a whole new appreciation for how difficult spaceflight is and how close we are to failure all the time.

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I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately about what it means for managing organizations now that Generation Y makes up a significant part of the workforce. I’ve also been reading some articles that discuss the difficulty and frustration managers today have with the younger workforce. Hopefully this post will help managers as they try to navigate leading their leaders as well as Gen Y’ers who are entering the workforce and are looking for opportunities to do their part in changing the world.

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