Categories: General

Leadership insights from a NASA flight director

Earlier today, I attended a talk by Gene Kranz (NASA flight
director during the Gemini
and Apollo programs).
I seriously enjoyed his insights into leadership, teamwork, org structure,
determination, focus, and TRUST amongst teammates. It was interesting to hear about
how information flowed to the mission’s leaders and how decisions were made.
Every aspect of the mission had to be analyzed and documented (side note: nothing
beats good documentation), processes were designed and captured for every
single aspect of the mission, checklists were created in advance, everyone was
the best at what they did, multidisciplinary teams, and so much more. It’s
amazing how many similarities exist in the way successful teams operate and the
attributes that make good leaders, irrespective of the discipline or the era.
His talk was based on his book “Failure is not an option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond“.

Image source: Wikipedia

Savas Parastatidis

Savas Parastatidis works at Amazon as a Sr. Principal Engineer in Alexa AI'. Previously, he worked at Microsoft where he co-founded Cortana and led the effort as the team's architect. While at Microsoft, Savas also worked on distributed data storage and high-performance data processing technologies. He was involved in various e-Science projects while at Microsoft Research where he also investigated technologies related to knowledge representation & reasoning. Savas also worked on language understanding technologies at Facebook. Prior to joining Microsoft, Savas was a Principal Research Associate at Newcastle University where he undertook research in the areas of distributed, service-oriented computing and e-Science. He was also the Chief Software Architect at the North-East Regional e-Science Centre where he oversaw the architecture and the application of Web Services technologies for a number of large research projects. Savas worked as a Senior Software Engineer for Hewlett Packard where he co-lead the R&D effort for the industry's Web Service transactions service and protocol. You can find out more about Savas at https://savas.me/about