Churchill Quote and Motivation

Brian Kennemer posted a Winston Churchill quote asking if anyone else thinks this is the worst management quote ever heard?

In Project Apollo: The Tough Decisions and Managing the Apollo Moon Program the authors speak of how the management processes were motivated.

Dr. Kraft speaking about their learnings - That’s another profound thing, in my opinion. I think that the thing we learned, and the thing that made us strong, was that we knew about failure. We recognized failure, we knew it was there, we always looked for it.

And everything we did was based on decisions on failure rather than success. And if you want my opinion, that is what happened to NASA in the Challenger accident, their decisions were based on success, and the people sitting right here made decisions based on failure. And that may sound crazy as hell, but I believe that is the way we did it.

They were motivated from failure not from success

Those interviewed for the oral history project and the background materials for the paper history have stated that the current NASA administration is motivated from success. As such they begin to have a "risk avoidance" attitude and a risk submersion process.

The Apollo Program moved from one failure to another eventually landing on the moon and returning with the crew safely aboard.