Most of us think of the Mars Pathfinder mission as a triumph of technological wizardry. But Brian Muirhead, the engineer who spearheaded the project, sees it as something else: a triumph of managerial efficiency. The previous Mars mission had cost $3 billion. Muirhead, who was originally hired by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in part because of his real-world experience repairing Harley-Davidson motorcycles, had to do it for $150 million--less, he notes, than it cost James Cameron to film Titanic. The mantra at JPL was "Faster, better, cheaper." In an era of government belt-tightening, NASA had to prove to America that it could manage more spectacular space missions with less money, and in less time, too.

High Velocity Leadership shows how Muirhead and his team proved not only that "Faster, better, cheaper" can work but that's it an excellent way to get things done. He and coauthor Simon walk readers through the project from conception to triumphant completion, giving each chapter a didactic spin. For example, in one chapter he talks about how a manager must be both the "glue" that keeps a team together and the "grease" that keeps it moving forward.

But while Muirhead has learned a few textbook lessons about management--he quotes several gurus in that field--he has learned also from the school of hard knocks. Thus, every management principle described in High Velocity Leadership includes theory, real-life examples from the Mars Pathfinder mission, and a life lesson or two. --Lou SchulerThe Martian dust hadn't been stirred by a craft from Earth in twenty-one years. This time the challenge had come with nearly impossible constraints: go there at a fraction of the cost, do it in a fraction of the time, take risks but don't fail. We were working on a budget less than it would later cost to produce the movie Titanic, but unlike the movie we would need to provide a happy ending.

Our eftort, the Mars Pathfinder mission, has come to define the management approach of Faster, Better, Cheaper.

So begins this roller-coaster ride -- a management book wrapped in a powerful, real-world adventure story. At age forty-one, Brian Muirhead assembled a team that would have to build a spacecraft and land it on Mars for one-twentieth the cost and in half the time of the previous Mars effort twenty years earlier.

Experts who were sure the team could not succeed were stunned on Independence Day 1997, when Pathfinder landed safely on Mars and, aided by its self-propelled, toy-wagon-size rover, Sojourner, began sending back reams of scientific data and thousands of breathtaking color photographs from a rock-strewn terrain under a salmon-colored sky.

In this fast-paced personal account, Muirhead and coauthor William L. Simon explain how the Pathfinder team overcame the odds by discarding the familiar and replacing it with imaginative new technology, a highly unusual organizational structure, and a score of innovative business solutions ranging from the geography of the workplace to ways of speeding up procurement to an intuitive style of decision making on the run.

A chronicle of personal struggles and sacrifices that led to a historic triumph of space exploration, High Velocity Leadership provides powerful guidance on how Faster, Better, Cheaper can be put to work in your own organization.