Page 40 - Becoming a Successful Manager

The Staff Mosaic—Working Together 31

In another section, we’ll discuss delegation in more detail, but
for now, think about how it worked in this U.S. space program
challenge.
Once President John F. Kennedy decreed the United States
would put a man on the moon within a decade, new ideas and new
approaches were developed to meet the challenges of space travel. An
entirely new industry was born, and new technology was developed
to achieve the president’s lofty goal. If the engineers continued to
use only the traditional construction techniques they would not have
produced the modern spacecraft. Consider this: If the NASA engi-
neers had used traditional techniques, they would have put wings
on a locomotive in order to have a powerful machine that would

fly to the moon. The locomotive is certainly a powerful machine,
and everyone knows wings are necessary for fl ight. Putting them
together would seem to be a logical solution to the challenge.
Logical, yes, but it wouldn’t work. Instead, new perspectives
resulted in new solutions. Such creative thinking “outside the box”
allows ideas to soar and interesting results to present themselves.
Take the lessons of managing a virtual community into your world
and perhaps you and your staff might develop your own business
version of a spacecraft rather than putting organizational wings
on a corporate locomotive.

What Do They Use to Communicate?

Communication has always been about moving information from
one person to another, and exchanging ideas requires a set of tools
to move the data. As the tools have changed, so have the tech-
niques and the speed of moving those ideas. When this coun-
try was founded, sending a message via mail back to England