Adam Steltzner > Quotes

“A more cohesive team would have sensed the disconnect. The lesson I learned from this mistake was that you not only have to find something to love about each of your people; you have to extend that love far and wide to all the other divisions and departments that you depend on.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“In the real world of budgets and politics and the dynamics of large organizations, getting anything done is a no-holds-barred brawl, and as in any street fight, success or failure is a function of everything you bring to it: cleverness and intelligence, knowledge and technical prowess, charisma or awareness, shyness or the ability to persuade, confidence or self-doubt, self-awareness or denial.”
― Adam Steltzner

“OODA loop.” The acronym, from military strategy, stands for “observe, orient, decide, act.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“To shift our team’s culture, I continued to push hard with the questions, driving insight at a pace that established my leadership and encouraged the team members to question and dig deeper.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“engineer, a most human profession—one part creator, one part understander.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“The converse lesson is that anyone who waits around to be authorized to speak up is never going to be a leader. It’s just not in their nature.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“In the real world of budgets and politics and the dynamics of large organizations, getting anything done is a no-holds-barred brawl, and as in any street fight, success or failure is a function of everything you bring to it: cleverness and intelligence, knowledge and technical prowess, charisma or awkwardness, shyness or the ability to persuade, self-confidence”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“to be recognized or leave.” Here’s what I wish I could tell my younger, impatient self: Advancement and influence in any industry do not in general keep pace with an industry’s most famous outliers. At least in a meritocracy, such as JPL, if you do good work and really focus on mastery and excellence, good things happen, for the institution and for you. That is not to say that “the institution” is a benevolent, all-knowing, and all-rewarding entity, but any institution desperately needs good people. There is a vacuum at the top. Their desire for good people and talent is insatiable. If you do good work that is valuable to the institution, you will inevitably be vacuumed upward. What’s more, true authority comes not from a title or position but because your words are well thought out, or at least strive to be. Nothing puts more weight into your opinion than that it is well considered, well articulated, and coming from”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“Any truth we arrive at, no matter how diligently we pursue it, is always going to be an approximation, a model of the universe and not the universe itself.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“he had never in his life tried to change the way anything was done.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“going to bring my whole self to the task at hand, and the biggest part of that task was going to be leadership. We humans are an extremely social”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“recognize that when you are system-engineering, you are really engineering not only the engineering system but also the human system that creates it.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“If you get a raise at a NASA field center, it’s through an act of Congress. To get fired, it almost takes an act of Congress.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“but truth is, a leader doesn’t have to be liked by everyone on the team, and probably shouldn’t be.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“To solve the bowling ball problem, you need to utilize Newton’s second law of motion in two dimensions: the kinematics of the eventually rolling ball and the conditions of the ball when initially released. For undergraduates, that is a lot to untangle. They often neglect at least one of the puzzle pieces.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“We all share the instinct, and we can all relate to it, which gives our curiosity-driven need to explore the added beauty that no one has to be forced to do it. People don’t necessarily have to be incentivized with stock options and mega-salaries for curiosity-driven creativity to occur. The only essential ingredient is a work environment that’s structured to encourage our innate drive to wonder, question, and explore.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“In our designs we look for the simplest, lowest-risk way of solving a problem.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“Meetings could erupt into shouting matches, but then everyone would walk out of the room unfazed and on good terms.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“In fact, it is our curiosity that we need to engage and our fear that we need to hold at bay, or release, if we’re going to find what we’re looking for.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“Hold on to the doubt” on those cheat sheets back at College of Marin, I was encouraging myself to breathe and let go of the fear so that I could sit beside the open question and really understand it.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“anxiety. It requires that both parties sit side by side with doubt and hold on to it no matter what the ego demands.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“constructive interference of personality disorders,” which”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“Breaking the matter down, understanding your state of understanding, and keeping your mind free and purely focused on the matter at hand—not yourself—”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“Over time I have found that most of what gets in the way of my seeing the universe as it really is comes from me. Excitement, pride, preconceptions of what the universe should look like all get in my way, but the most common block is fear. Fear that I won’t measure up, fear that I can’t get the answer to the open questions, fear that I will let others down, fear that I will shrink in the eyes of others and in my own esteem—all of these can sit in between me and understanding. I don’t think I’m alone.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“The bin of unknown knowns, which Rumsfeld has used to refer to things you think you know but you do not. This”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“(When you start your laptop, it takes about three seconds before you get that “bong” that tells you it’s fully up and running. For us, that upload took a full shift of six or eight hours.)”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“If you want people to take you seriously, better put your head down and be useful to them.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“which means that you stop trying to force the existing solution. That’s when a”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“At JPL we use a matrix organization structure—”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“settle for self-delusion these days, it’s usually because we’ve stopped short in our truth seeking and have accepted a subset of the universe in our model as being the whole universe. In engineering we might omit a term in an equation because we don’t think it is important”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation