Leadership & Performance Blog

Image of the final minutes of the February 2021 landing of Perseverance, Nasa’s Mars rover.

Image by NASA/JPL-Caltech, via https://mars.nasa.gov

Seven Minutes of Terror

Written by Toni Kendall & Michele Schleicher 

February 2021…
293 million miles away…
A journey of 6 months…
Travelling at 12,000 miles per hour…
Carrying a mini helicopter on its back…

…Perseverance, NASA’s Mars Rover went barreling through space to the point of having seven minutes to decelerate to Zero mph, and stick the landing on the surface of Mars – and it did!  This is the fifth perfect landing on Mars for NASA. That is five out of five for NASA since 1997.

The “Seven Minutes of Terror” were the seven minutes Perseverance entered Mars’ atmosphere; NASA had no radio signals to know if it would burn up, crash or safely land.

If the engineers at NASA had not “stuck the landing” on Mars, they would have burned up $2.7 billion in seconds!

What NASA accomplished is a demonstration of what real excellence is in organizations. READ MORE

Being Extraordinary No Matter What

Co-Authored by Mark Kamin, Marcea Wolf-Carter, and Kenda-Le Pernin

In our last blog, An Opportunity: The Crucible of Covid, we left you with a question:

“What new context could you create for yourself and your organization that would displace the future that is uncertain with a future you create?”

Managers and leaders must have a context they generate that calls the people they lead to fulfill something meaningful.^*1

The context we created for our company is “being extraordinary no matter what.” That context shapes how our people look at the current circumstances. They got a new pair of eyes! They see the world as an opportunity to be great. Their actions mirror being great. The number of leads generated increased by several hundred percent. READ MORE

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