I read an article by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker today about Nathan Myhrvold, former director of research at Microsoft, and his “Intellectual Ventures” endeavor. Their whole idea is to be a company that comes up with good ideas, patent them, and license to interested companies that have the technical expertise. As I was reading about what Intellectual Ventures has gotten itself into, I couldn’t help but think that this is precisely the sort of thing we’re looking to foster here at NASA with the innovation and collaboration initiatives.

Intellectual Ventures sponsors huge brainstorming sessions where the key people in the company bring in subject matter experts who can help them figure out which ideas will work and which won’t. Importantly, though, they understand that the vast majority of their ideas probably won’t go anywhere, but that’s okay because it will help them learn and eventually get them to an idea that will work. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently had a conversation with a friend about blogging. She said, “I would never blog—I’m worried enough about my words coming back to haunt me through email, let alone captured for the world to see through a blog.”

I told her how I was trying to learn the ropes of blogging (though I’m terribly infrequent about it, I know) and that I try to put at least some conscious thought into the words I use in any communication, including emails and even my post-it notes, which are carefully edited, often crumpled up and re-written to cram all the details I’m trying to convey on that tiny neon green sheet of paper before being applied to a coworker’s monitor in an attention-grabbing location. But, at the end of the day, I’m ok with my words running free, even through the abyss of the Internet.  Read the rest of this entry »

A lot of thought and discussion has occurred lately concerning how to improve our internal communications in NASA. Here at JSC, this discussion has culminated with the release of the 20 Year Vision proposal. I am both honored and fortunate to have met with some of the people who made it happen and look forward to working with them on the implementation of those ideas.

With that in mind, I think that some of my professional experiences elsewhere can be brought to bear on this topic. In between undergrad and grad school, I worked in the intelligence community (IC) for a few years as a missile analyst. If you think the NASA community is results-oriented, the IC takes it to a whole new level.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I had a very interesting and thought-provoking discussion about the future of JSC and how we’re going to get there.  (I’m trying to be careful about name-dropping, so as to keep the focus here on the ideas more so than personalities.)  One of the subjects we broached was how JSC is famous for its mission operations work, but that a lot of the good engineering work we’re doing here is going unnoticed by the public-at-large.  I’ll actually be meeting with someone tomorrow who is heading up the Engineering Directorate’s efforts to share their innovations both internally and externally.  However, that effort is inexorably tied to the larger question of what our focus should be as an organization.  That central question that has preoccupied my thoughts lately.

Successful organizations tend to be those that focus on a particular area and do that extremely well, as I was reminded yesterday.  In our case here at JSC, that would clearly be mission operations and support.  If that is going to be our focus, then we might need to be prepared to offload projects in the same vein as the now-defunct X-38 to other NASA centers and stay centered on our area of excellence.  When asked where I see JSC being in 20 years, I said that I would like to see JSC essentially serving as the staging area for lunar outpost and Mars sortie missions and support.  That doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for “the other stuff,” especially in an era where we must be prepared to expect static budgets.  However, I also believe that we must remember that operations are not an end unto themselves.  As the Global Exploration Architecture clearly shows, we must have achievable, relevant scientific goals to be working towards.  Our operations must be the means to accomplishing specific ends in science and exploration.

Read the rest of this entry »

I woke up at 3:00 am this morning and couldn’t sleep.  So I caught up on a couple of online videos I’d been meaning to watch instead.

The first was Sunday’s 60 Minutes segment entitled “The Next Giant Leap for Mankind.”  I heard several months ago that they were at Goddard filming because they were doing a segment on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).  Naturally, I was pretty excited, as I thought it would be cool to see “my” mission on display for the world.

Read the rest of this entry »

NASA has been working toward increasing public understanding of what it does and why it is relevant to the public. NASA has created a message which intends to bring this understanding home and succinctly encapsulate everything that it does. While I am a large advocate for creating a guiding coalition, creating vision, communicating the vision, encourage action and celebrating short-term wins for internal change (see Kotter’s Harvard Business Review Article, “Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail“), externally, I believe NASA should focus on output.

I recall seeing historic television clips of Apollo astronauts in parades rolling through the streets in convertibles. These were heroes accomplishing extraordinary tasks. While I was not involved in this program, it seems to have been a celebration of feats performed and needed no script. The voice of the Apollo program was not the NASA spokesperson, it was Walter Cronkite. NASA focused on achieving its mandate and let everyone else do the talking.

Read the rest of this entry »