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by snowwrestler
4462 days ago
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Big things are only accomplished by teams. Building and maintaining a team of people who are skilled and work well and productively together is actually very difficult. Most teams fail to achieve anything lasting of note. For example, most startups fail. NASA needs great engineering to build things like the Mars Rover. But they also need great management--it takes both. |
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Big things are accomplished by people with high ability. Adding team support to those people will reduce the amount of time required for those people to finish. Adding good management to the team reduces the overall cost and prevents friction.
Building a team that works better together than the sum of the individuals in it working separately is actually pretty easy. The hard part is getting everyone to do something specific and profitable. The reason why startups fail is usually because not enough real people wanted to spend enough real money on the product to pay the team members as much as they could earn doing something else. If you try to assign blame for that, it might not even land on the same continent.
NASA only needs great management to stay on time and under budget. With no basis for comparison, no one can say for certain whether any particular feat of engineering prowess was fast or slow, cheap or expensive. But it is starting to become apparent that engineers of equal ability, working at SpaceX instead of a larger and older space contractor, can launch cargo into orbit faster and more cheaply. That's the difference management makes.
Engineering provides the raw ability. Management sets the multiplier for time and money costs.