In Fired Up or Burned Out, I wrote about the lack of Knowledge Flow (or Voice) at NASA and how it contributed to the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster. National Geographic produced an excellent documentary about the Challenger disaster that’s available on Hulu.com. You can access it at Challenger: The Untold Story.
In most organizations there are truth tellers who have the courage to speak truth to power. In this case, Morton Thiokol engineer Roger Boisjoly and The Rogers Commission’s Richard Feynman emerge as the courageous truth tellers. Feynman appears in another chapter of Fired Up or Burned Out as the young supervising engineer of the Manhattan Project who asks Robert Oppenheimer to tell the supporting engineers the purpose of the project (which results in a tenfold increase in their productivity). Feynman also appeared in Apple’s “Think Different” advertising campaign (above).
