Finished (Paper Book) - "Failure is Not an Option" - Gene Kranz

"Failure is not an Option" is an excellent book.  It covers the Mercury (one man), Gemini (2-man) and Apollo (3-man) missions from the late 1950's through the early 1970's.

This book, along with being a chronology and history of the manned space program, proved to be an excellent management strategy book, and a must-read for anyone who considers themselves to be a leader, or is in a position where they SHOULD be considering themselves as leaders.  In my experience, many "leaders" are micro-managers, who "lead" only for personal gratification.  Kranz's book shows what actual leadership is - identifying and training a good team, keeping responsibility and integrity in the forefront of all decisions, focus on the key issue(s) and problem(s) and working/training to make sure that there is full trust in the team when the going gets tough.  This means that "obedience" is not a characteristic of wording teams - they are expected to bring up alternatives, to question your decisions, to make sure that their input is heard and integrated.  At the end of the day the team decides what to do, and all members, as they are part of the process, believe in the outcome and stand behind decisions, not waste time, energy, focus and trust by second-guessing their teammates.

I remember the first moon mission, and the subsequent missions, though I was young enough to take it as a fact, but not realize how momentous it actually was ("didn't they go to the moon a while ago?  Why are they not showing my cartoons?").  Thus, the basics of the stories were known to me, what Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions did, and how they formed steps to the moon.  I'll admit that I wasn't born when Apollo 1 burned on the launchpad, and didn't really hear about Apollo 13 in any detail until the Tom Hanks movie.

What astounded me in the book, was how many critical issues and problems had to be dealt with on each mission - failure to solve the problems in real-time with primitive computing power would cause, at best, an abort, and at worst, catastrophic death of the astronauts and/or others if the event happened at launch or soon thereafter.  Switch problems, primitive computer coding and other $10 problems become critical when you can't run down to Canadian Tire or Radio Shack to pick up spare parts.  The ability of mission control to isolate, understand, and solve these problems with the world watching is incredible - that's why it is such a manual of leadership.

Highly recommended.