The Smart Mission: Nasa's Lessons for Managing Knowledge, People, and Projects

Edward J. Hoffman, currently CEO of Knowledge Strategies, LLC, and Senior Lecturer at Columbia University, was NASA’s first Chief Knowledge Officer and founder of the NASA Academy of Program/Project and Engineering Leadership (APPEL). Following the Columbia shuttle failure, he led the team that designed the Strategic Management and Governance Handbook. He is the coauthor of Shared Voyage: Learning and Unlearning from Remarkable Projects.
 
Matthew Kohut, former major communication advisor to NASA, is coauthor of Compelling People: The Hidden Qualities That Make Us Influential, named one of Amazon’s Best Business Books of 2013.
 
Laurence Prusak, former strategy consultant to Hoffman at NASA, is Senior Lecturer in the Information and Knowledge Strategy graduate program at Columbia University and the coauthor of Working Knowledge, a widely cited text about how knowledge works in organizations, and other books.
 

Introduction vii
1 Knowledge 1
2 Learning 23
3 Stories: Knowledge, Meaning, and Community 47
4 Culture 65
5 Teaming 81
6 Global Collaboration: The International Space Station 105
Don Cohen
7 The Way Forward: Mission-Critical Advice 123
Notes 131
Index 145