Next month, my colleague Jason Pankau and I will speak about leadership, employee engagement, productivity and innovation at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Exploring Leadership Colloquium. We’re excited about this in part because, as several NASA employees I recently spoke with said, “we do cool work.” We also believe our work is very relevant to NASA. In our book, Fired Up or Burned Out, we wrote about how knowledge traps contributed to the Challenger and Columbia accidents. I wrote a blog post about it entitled “When Failure is Not an Option.” If you are interested in this topic, take a look at the outstanding National Geographic video special entitled “Challenger: The Untold Story.”
Next month I will also be speaking at the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) in DC. I’m thrilled to be speaking there too. First of all, I’m a former auditor (at Texas Instruments). I also know how critical the GAO’s work is to our country. Checks and balances, including a strong audit function, are required to keep people honest, a topic that Montesquieu wrote about in his masterpiece, The Spirit of the Laws.
