Management Lessons From The Moon

Five things we can learn from how NASA put astronauts on the moon and brought them safely back 50 years ago.

- Peter Coy

There’s something faintly embarrassing about the 50th anniversary of the first moonwalk. It was just so long ago. It’s no longer “we” who put a man on the moon, it’s “they” who put a man on the moon. So why can’t “we” do it? It’s hard not to feel that for all the technological advances of the last half-century, America has lost something —the ability to unite and overcome long odds to achieve greatness.

At one level this is silly. The U.S. stopped going to the moon because Americans stopped seeing the point of it, not because they stopped being capable of it. The lack of fresh footprints on the lunar surface is not evidence that the U.S. has fallen into a new Dark Age.

Still, the historic Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs do have something to teach us. They were a shining success story of building and managing a complex, decentralized technological enterprise that accomplished an audaciously ambitious goal. In November 1968, seven months before the moon landing, the journal Science wrote that the space program’s “most valuable spin-off of all will be human rather than technological: better knowledge of how to plan, coordinate, and monitor the multitudinous and varied activities of the organizations required to accomplish great social undertakings.”

Mission management is as important now as it was in the ’60s. The new moonshots include curing disease, ending poverty, and fixing climate change. But a million things can go wrong when there are a million moving parts. Consider the problems with Boeing Co.’s grounded 737 Max airliner or Lockheed Martin Corp.’s costly F-35 fighter jets. And what about billionaire Elon Musk’s unrelenting challenges, down on the ground, in manufacturing electric vehicles at Tesla Inc.? Each case involves difficulties in mission management.