Mission Ready

The leader of a major NASA mission provides a practical guide to developing teams that excel in high-stakes situations

Lindy Elkins-Tanton leads NASA’s Psyche mission, a $1.2 billion megaproject that sent a spacecraft on an eight-year journey to investigate an asteroid between Mars and Jupiter. Along the way, she has managed challenges ranging from potentially catastrophic technological malfunctions and overbudget subcontractors to fraught email chains about who clogged the toilet. And she has done it all while building an extraordinary team culture. In Mission Ready, Elkins-Tanton shows other leaders how to do the same.

Mission Ready provides a blueprint for building strong teams capable of delivering exceptional results in high-pressure situations. Leaders set the tone, but every team member determines both their own success and the success of the team. Drawing on social science, cognitive science, and organizational science research, Elkins-Tanton gives practical advice on how both individual contributors and leaders can excel. Even for projects that don’t involve launching a rocket into space, the lessons in this book will help readers guide their teams to new heights.

Author Biography

Lindy Elkins-Tanton is a professor at UC Berkeley, director of the Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, and lead of the NASA Psyche mission. She is the author of A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman. She lives in Richmond, California.