GK: Actually it was not a phrase that I originated. I use it nowadays but as we were finishing up our work in the mission control centre, this is about three hours after the explosion, I had formed up my Tiger Team, and I gave them a brief speech but it basically said: “We’ve never lost an American in space and we sure as hell aren’t going to lose one now. When you leave this room you have got to believe, your team has to believe, that we are bringing this crew home. Now go make it happen!” And this was apparently too long for the people who did the script for the movie so they translated that very long statement into a single catch phrase of: “Failure is not an option.”
MF: Reading your book, which I enjoyed very much, you often talk about people who inspired you personally or who mentored you. Do you think that’s very important for technical and professional people to have a mentor within their working life?
GK: I think that as an individual, as a team member, and as a leader, they need mentors. But mentors really exist all over. If you read between the lines in my book, you’ll find that the first boss I ever worked for in flight test, a gentleman by the name of Harry Carroll, taught me enthusiasm. The man who taught me to fly taught me trust. Ralph Saylor, who was my boss at Hollomon Air Force Base, taught me about accountability and responsibility. Chris Kraft taught me to accept risk. So basically mentors exist all over. It can be your co-workers. It can be teachers in school. It can be people that you read about, and what you have to do is you have to form an open mind that allows you to accept this lesson from this broad range of people. I think most people think of mentors as somebody who is going to simply be a godfather to them. They’re going to carve out their role in technical and professional life, but what they have to do is they have to just be like a sponge. They have to listen, listen, listen, and they’ll start getting these lessons in mentoring from the people around them.
MF: Thinking about what Kennedy said when launching the Apollo program, “we choose to go to the moon.” That gave you and your entire team a very clear mission, a very clear goal and objective for the program. Do you think it is an important thing for large projects to have a very clear - even inspirational - goal?
GK: Well yeah. And there’s no question that it was not only an inspirational goal, it did several things. First of all it really set what I would say impossible dreams out in front of us. This is the Camelot kind of a goal that says: gee whiz in our lifetime we are the ones lucky enough to be chosen to work this program that’s going to take us to the moon. It also set a deadline that said, within this decade. And Kennedy also used the term, “We’re doing this not because it is easy but it’s because it is hard,” and he recognized the difficulty that we faced, and then he followed on by saying, “because this goal will then cause the best of our abilities to move forward.”
This post is an extract from an article by the author previously published in 2002 in The Connection, the journal of ITUG the independent user group for HP NonStop Servers.
You can buy Gene Kranz's excellent autobiography Failure is not an option from amazon here
