Lean Knowledge Management

CHAPTER 1

How Knowledge Management Helped Change NASA’s Culture

On the afternoon of January 27, 1967, with less than three years left to accomplish President Kennedy’s goal of landing an American on the Moon, astronauts Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffe, and Ed White climbed into the Apollo Command and Service Module (CSM) capsule atop a Saturn rocket at Cape Canaveral’s Complex 34 for a launch rehearsal test.

Astronaut Grissom, at one point became so frustrated with the continual communication problems and garbled voices he heard through his headset, yelled into his microphone, “How are we going to get to the moon if we can’t talk between two or three buildings?”

Suddenly, less than a minute after Grissom’s outburst, a stunned Mission Control could ...