The Right Kind of Crazy

Not your run-of-the-mill leadership book, this one was highly entertaining (though I'm not sure how much of that was intentional). The author/protagonist is a somewhat egoistic engineer with a free spirit and loads of self-assurance. He ends up at JPL and involved in some pretty gnarly, rocket sciencey projects, which he takes charge of because... well, you'll see. The point is that there's definitely some good leadership material here, some fascinating insights into JPL and NASA, and quite an amusing, introspective perspective from a guy who is at least trying to do a better job leading people to a bigger truth than themselves. I'd recommend it.

This reminded me of Trady Kidder's [b:The Soul of a New Machine 7090 The Soul of a New Machine Tracy Kidder https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1441207522l/7090.SY75.jpg 882196]. A high stakes environment, the stress and the excitement of technical innovation, a bunch of (mostly) guys who need to figure out how to work together, someone who needs to figure out how to keep everyone motivated. When you are system-engineering, you are really engineering not only the engineering system, but also the human system that creates it.This is a book about the EDL (Entry, Descent and Landing) development for the Mars Curiosity rover at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the many hurdles and technical challenges they had to overcome (heat shields melting, parachutes exploding) until those famous 7-minutes when their labor of years would autonomously descend onto Mars. It's also a biography of the guy who let the EDL mission (who sounds about as chummy and cocky as you imagine a guy in his job to be). And what I probably liked most, it's also a book about the creative process and it's dark sides. His analogy is the ‘dark room' - when you're stuck in your development and don't have any viable path out of it. How then to make curiosity-based decisions instead of fear-based ones. And how to transform ‘unknown unknowns' into ‘known unknowns' just a little bit. It's pretty comforting to read about billion-dollar government-supported endeavours, and realize they run into all the same complications little projects run into as well. They also have organizational issues, they also run out of time and need to compromise with option B or C.