Leadership from the Mission Control Room to the Boardroom: A Guide to Unleashing Team Performance

This book is approved for SHRM recertification credit.

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Failure is always an option, and so is choosing to lead your team into an environment that helps them avoid catastrophe and pull off miracles. For more than fifty years, NASA's Mission Control has done just that.

Take the ultimate insider's look at the leadership values and culture that made that track record possible. Paul Hill paints a vivid picture, candidly portraying the critical cultural connections in human spaceflight triumphs and failures. By demonstrating how his Mission Control team learned to steward this culture into their management roles, Paul provides a guide for any organization to boost their own performance by leveraging the core ideas and values that have delivered "impossible" wins for decades.

About the Author

Paul Sean Hill is a leadership evangelist - an author, public speaker, and executive consultant - focusing on universal leadership challenges like risk management, critical thinking, and leading change.
As NASA's Director of Mission Operations from 2007 through 2014, Paul was responsible for all aspects of human spaceflight mission planning, training, and Mission Control. In this role, Paul led a critical leadership transformation, dramatically reduced costs, and increased capability, all while still conducting highly successful missions in space.

Before this, he held a number of senior leadership positions including Deputy Manager of the Extravehicular Activity Office, Manager of Shuttle Operations, and Deputy Director of Mission Operations. Paul served as a Space Shuttle and International Space Station Flight Director leading flight preparation and execution from Mission Control for 24 missions from 1996 through 2005, with his final assignment as the Lead Flight Director for the return-to-flight after the Space Shuttle Columbia accident.

Paul is a member of the Texas A&M University Aerospace Engineering Advisory Board and the Texas A&M University - Galveston Board of Visitors. He is also a member of Marshall Goldsmith's 100 Coaches. Paul holds Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in Aerospace Engineering from Texas A&M University where he was a member of the Corps of Cadets.