“The Summer of 69″

It was the summer of 1969, a hot, balmy Miami midsummer night, and I was between high school graduation and my first quarter at college. For me, the summer of 69 represented a big transition from the euphoria and fun of one phase of my life into the passageway to the next filled with uncertainties and high expectations. With many friends going in different directions the coming fall, including some in new uniforms to Southeast Asia, the memories of that summer remain, vivid and reflective. That particular night was July 20^th, forty years ago today, and the night that many of us heard the phrase crackling over the TV and radios, “The Eagle Has Landed.” That day man stepped on the moon. That day, science fiction became mankind’s science fact, and a sea-change of what we believed we could achieve as people took place across the world.

It all had started many years earlier, with a wake-up call given to us, by our loss in 1959 of the first leg of a race to space to the Russians. In fact, they won it before we knew we were really racing. The real race, the one against ourselves and our fears, began May 25, 1961 with John F Kennedy’s wonderful visionary speech to Congress (See the “Fly Me to the Moon” posting). We won that race, not just we as the US, but we as a society that had learned to find a way for both the public and private sectors to set a shared goal and reach it, overcoming those real and imagined impossibilities, those created by constraints in knowledge, technology, and paradigms. Other big challenges waited, including the greatest example of business and leadership agility in modern history, the Apollo 13 rescue (coming soon to this theater near you…) That fall, I started my undergraduate studies in aerospace engineering at Georgia Tech.

The world we know today, one filled with lifestyle defining technologies, GPS, the web, and personal gadgetry, had its infancy in the very same work places and laboratories that launched those modern day Flash Gordons and Buck Rogers. Some know the very people who tackled those challenges. Today we face some pretty stiff challenges. We face problems that tap into our fears and have demonstrated that they too can redefine lifestyles, currently for the worse for many of us. But, we should remember that 40 years ago we put a man on the moon! With the right vision, leadership and shared purpose, problems were then, as the are now, springboards for not only solutions to problems, but springboards for unbounded innovation for the common good.

Whether we serve in the public sector, private or both, we are lucky to live in this time of challenge. We do not have a constraint in the quality of DNA needed for overcoming this challenge. We have a challenge in how we energize and focus a call to arms between the many needed to solve problems and create new value. Many years ago, a much wiser colleague asked me during an engagement with an important customer, “John, are we trying to be right, or are we trying to be helpful?” As we look within and across our organizations, how are we facing our challenges?

• Do we face one another across the table with the tools of PowerPoint and FingerPoint?
• Do we sit all on the same side of the table and collectively face a shared challenge?
• Do we as leaders set the tone for our teams to motivate them to “be right” or expect them to “be helpful”
• Do we believe that what we see as insurmountable is truly a real “it can’t be done?”

I think I can hear Neil Armstrong, “One small step for man…”