A Very Public Failure

So we were talking about the penalty of leadership and good leaders who have great scars. I've got a lot of ’em. Talk to me about some of your battle scars.

Well, this one happens to be NASA.

Okay.

And it was very, very public. The interesting thing is if one has a failure, it sticks within the family but when you're out there, the whole world knows. I pushed faster, better, cheaper. My failure was I never quite explained it so people actually understood.

The concept of faster, better, cheaper is instead of building giant things that get launched infrequently, each of which costs a lot of money, so you almost have to guarantee success, is to chop it up into a lot of smaller things and do them faster, so you could afford a failure. That was how we were able to bring down the time, the development time, the cycle time, and the average cost per system. But you need one to two failures out of ten to get there.

We launched a shuttle, everyone that went to space came back safely. We had this wonderful mission to Mars. We landed the first robot ever to deploy on Mars. And it was a spectacular success. So we kept achieving and I wanted more, and I didn't know the limitations so I said, we cut the price and we cut the time with Pathfinder. The prior mission in then year dollars was three billion and the time was ten years. We did it in a little under 300 million in three years. So I said, okay, let's squeeze a little bit more. So we then had the next series of missions to Mars, both of them failed.

Wow.

It was major news all over the place, but it was okay. Because instead of spending billions, we spent hundreds of millions.

Right.

I flew out to California, I took the team that did so great on the Pathfinder mission but failed on this other mission. I took them to dinner and I said, I don't want you to stop but we need to be a little more cautious and I pushed you too hard. I'm responsible for the failure. Now this is before the whole damn world! (chuckles) I had to admit that and we called the press conference the next day and in front of the whole JPL team I stood in front of ten, fourteen cameras, the whole media, and I said I was responsible. I pushed the limits too hard because I wanted to save more money and more time. I didn't sleep that night.

That took courage.

It hurt. And to this day people still don't understand faster, better, cheaper.