People Need a North Star

I was a young boy when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon.

I remember sitting on the shag carpet in our family room, watching television with my parents and sister. I certainly didn't understand orbital mechanics, propulsion systems, or the thousands of engineering problems that had to be solved to put two men on the lunar surface.

But I understood the goal.

President Kennedy had made it remarkably simple: before the decade was out, America was going to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth.

It was almost like one of those fundraising thermometers they used to put in front of churches. Everybody could see the top.

That was the North Star.

There was an enormous and complicated plan underneath it. There were milestones, failures, terrible losses, and course corrections. Thousands of people were doing work most Americans could never begin to understand.

But we knew where they were going.

I thought about that again this weekend while watching the launch of NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

The technology is extraordinary. Roman will give scientists images with roughly Hubble's sharpness while seeing an area of the sky at least 100 times larger.

But what really grabbed me wasn't simply the technology.

It was the plan.

During the pre-launch coverage, the interviewer held up a tiny 10-pixel detector chip between her fingers. Beside her on her desk sat Roman's much larger detector array - 18 detectors assembled together into a detector chip panel of more than 300 million pixels.

The explanation immediately made sense to me because it started with something I already understood: the camera in my phone.

Pixels.

I know pixels. I take pictures with them every day.

Suddenly this incredibly sophisticated telescope was no longer completely mysterious. The scale and science are extraordinary, but the basic idea was understandable.

I remember thinking: Oh my God. I get it.

Then they explained the difference between Hubble and Roman. Hubble can give us extraordinarily detailed observations of relatively small areas. Roman can survey enormous portions of the sky. Farther down the road is the planned Habitable Worlds Observatory, whose goals include directly studying Earth-like planets around stars like our Sun and examining their atmospheres for possible signs of life.

Think about the progression.

Look deeper.

Look broader.

Find the most promising places.

Then go looking for life.

I understand where we're going.

And when people understand where they're going, something changes.

I've seen that throughout my business career.

A company hires another person. Why?

It buys a new piece of equipment. Why?

It invests in software, opens another facility, enters a new market, reorganizes the company, or asks its people to endure six difficult months of change.

Why?

Too often the answer amounts to: Trust us.

That's not a plan.

Good leaders give people something much more valuable.

Here is where we're going.

Here is why it matters.

Here is what we think it will take.

Here is what we're investing.

Here are the milestones.

Here is how we'll know whether it's working.

And if we're wrong, here is how we'll recognize it and adjust.

A plan isn't a promise that nothing will go wrong. Apollo certainly proved that.

A plan gives people a common direction when something does.

Another part of Sunday's launch struck me from a business standpoint.

Roman rode into space aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy.

I was watching from the ground in my community, about two hours north of Cape Canaveral. I could see the two side boosters separate, turn around, and begin their trip back toward the Cape. I watched them coming home with my own eyes, then watched the actual landings, back at Cape Canaveral, on my phone.

I've seen SpaceX boosters land in person before, and it remains extraordinary: launch into space, separate, turn around, fly home, and land vertically so they can be reused.

That is not simply spectacular engineering.

That is a business model you can see.

Watch the SpaceX employees when those rockets land.

They cheer.

Not the obligatory applause at the end of a corporate meeting. They react like people who have personally accomplished something.

Because they have.

They know the mission. They know today's objective. They know whether they succeeded. And they can literally watch the result of their work come out of the sky and land on a concrete pad.

I found myself unexpectedly emotional watching all of this.

Maybe because somewhere in it I recognized something I first experienced as a little boy sitting on that shag carpet: a large group of people doing something extraordinarily difficult together, and they knew where they were trying to go.

Most businesses will never have a mission as dramatic as exploring the universe.

They don't need one.

People still want to know what winning looks like. They want to understand why money is being spent. They want to know how their work connects to something larger. They want milestones that tell them whether they're getting closer.

And occasionally they need to stop long enough to celebrate what they've accomplished before starting the next leg of the journey.

The same principle applies to a business, a family, a nonprofit, a community, and perhaps even a country.

We spend an enormous amount of time talking about what things cost. We should.

But maybe we should spend more time answering the question that comes before it:

Where are we trying to go?

Give people a credible North Star. Give them a plan they can understand. Show them the progress. Admit when something isn't working. Adjust the route without losing the destination.

Then watch what people are capable of doing together.

I saw it on a television set from a shag carpet in 1969.

And Sunday morning, standing two hours north of Cape Canaveral, I felt it again.

---