Our eftort, the Mars Pathfinder mission, has come to define the management approach of Faster, Better, Cheaper.
So begins this roller-coaster ride -- a management book wrapped in a powerful, real-world adventure story. At age forty-one, Brian Muirhead assembled a team that would have to build a spacecraft and land it on Mars for one-twentieth the cost and in half the time of the previous Mars effort twenty years earlier.
Experts who were sure the team could not succeed were stunned on Independence Day 1997, when Pathfinder landed safely on Mars and, aided by its self-propelled, toy-wagon-size rover, Sojourner, began sending back reams of scientific data and thousands of breathtaking color photographs from a rock-strewn terrain under a salmon-colored sky.
In this fast-paced personal account, Muirhead and coauthor William L. Simon explain how the Pathfinder team overcame the odds by discarding the familiar and replacing it with imaginative new technology, a highly unusual organizational structure, and a score of innovative business solutions ranging from the geography of the workplace to ways of speeding up procurement to an intuitive style of decision making on the run.
A chronicle of personal struggles and sacrifices that led to a historic triumph of space exploration, High Velocity Leadership provides powerful guidance on how Faster, Better, Cheaper can be put to work in your own organization.
