Dan In Focus

This short (83 pages) book, by Price Pritchett and Brian Muirhead, shares some of the nuggets of business management wisdom gleaned from the wildly successful Mars Pathfinder project. It is a short read – I finished it in a couple hours. I was introduced to it by my manager when he proclaimed it the ‘book of the month.’

I love science and this book is very interesting to me for the stories shared by JPL project director, Brian Muirhead. The format is very simple. Each chapter is titled with the attribute of the team with a short one or two page description on it by the co-author business consultant, Price Pritchett. Some of the attribute/chapters include “Set goals that make you stretch”, “Plan…and improvise”, Embrace eccentricity” and “Be fully trustworthy.” None of these traits are a surprise. Honestly, from a business team building standpoint, there is nothing new here.

It is the stories illustrating each attribute is what make the book interesting to me. The Pathfinder Mission was the first of the shoe string projects NASA commissioned. The normal explorer mission budgets top $2 billion, but this project was told to land a rover on Mars for under $170 million in three years. It seemed to be an impossible task. However, the team rose to the challenge and surpassed everyone’s wildest dreams. You may recall the rover was supposed to only wander Mars’ surface for 30 days. To everyone’s surprise, it lasted over 90 days, gathering data and transmitting it back to Earth.

Muirhead shares a story the exemplifies the point of the chapter. The stories are well chosen and artfully told. The attribute is illustrated in a way to make me want to find a way to capture it in my team, just as a book should do. Interestingly, I believe the book would have been much better without the little business college-style descriptions by Prichett. They should have just let Muirhead go and allowed him to write the whole thing. The only thing I wished for was more pictures and stories.

This is a fun, informative book that will get your innovative juices flowing. It will remind you how a small, dedicated team can really overcome the odds and make the impossible happen. It got me excited to try and bring a bit of that enthusiasm to my workplace. This is definitely worth a look.