Mission Ready

The leader of a major NASA mission provides a practical guide to developing teams that excel in high-stakes situations 

Lindy Elkins-Tanton leads NASA’s Psyche mission, a $1.2 billion megaproject that sent a spacecraft on an eight-year journey to investigate an asteroid between Mars and Jupiter. Along the way, she has managed challenges ranging from potentially catastrophic technological malfunctions and overbudget subcontractors to fraught email chains about who clogged the toilet. And she has done it all while building an extraordinary team culture. In Mission Ready, Elkins-Tanton shows other leaders how to do the same. 

Mission Ready provides a blueprint for building strong teams capable of delivering exceptional results in high-pressure situations. Leaders set the tone, but every team member determines both their own success and the success of the team. Drawing on social science, cognitive science, and organizational science research, Elkins-Tanton gives practical advice on how both individual contributors and leaders can excel. Even for projects that don’t involve launching a rocket into space, the lessons in this book will help readers guide their teams to new heights. 

• “Space missions fail for human reasons—and succeed because of them. With a great selection of space-flight stories and grounded research, Elkins-Tanton delivers a model for leadership that shows how clarity, kindness, and courage lead to mission success for any team.” 
  Bob Smith, former CEO, Blue Origin
• “Mission Ready is a powerful guide to building teams that thrive under pressure. Elkins-Tanton shows that when individuals are empowered, culture is thoughtfully built, and leadership is grounded in trust and transparency, teams can accomplish extraordinary things—even in the most challenging environments.” 
  Adena Friedman, chair and CEO, Nasdaq
• “I’ve been hanging out in high-performance innovation ecosystems for 50 years now—Boston, Silicon Valley, Austin. High-performance teams make the right things happen. One of their key skills is being able to take conversations up a level, to talk about what they are talking about. The good news from Professor Elkins-Tanton is that NASA teams of rocket scientists aren’t much different. Mission Ready is a how-to book about how to practice what she calls ‘metacognition.’ Read it, then send a copy to all your team members.” 
  Bob Metcalfe, Ethernet inventor and 3Com founder
• “Elkins-Tanton’s book reminds us of something we know but keep forgetting—that it is not technology alone that moves us forward. People in teams need to make things happen, from small start-ups to monumental undertakings like the NASA Psyche mission. Mission Ready is a practical guide—with checklists, surveys, and actionable advice—but the real experiences and examples chronicled by Elkins-Tanton are what bring these valuable lessons to life.” 
  Deepak Kamra, general partner, Canaan Partners