To Be a Better Project Manager, Think Like an Astronaut
Practical lessons from Scott Kelly’s record-breaking year aboard the International Space Station
As a project manager, I’ve read dozens of books that claimed they could help me navigate some of the trickier challenges of my role. Sustaining a creative vision when a key partner has stepped away. Fighting to support and retain top-tier staff. Investing internally in leadership while growing outside business relationships.
All of those are tensions I’ve struggled with at some point, but none of the methods I read about ever seemed to help. They were too outdated, or too complicated, or unnecessarily difficult to implement.
That changed the day I picked up a copy of Endurance: My Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery. It’s the memoir of veteran astronaut Scott Kelly, who spent a record-breaking year aboard the International Space Station. I’ve always been fascinated by everything space-related, but as I soon discovered, the book wasn’t just entertaining — it was the project management guide I’d been looking for.
Astronauts, as you can probably guess, work in extremely difficult conditions. As Kelly notes, a shuttle astronaut has a risk of death similar to what an allied infantryman faced on D-Day; for an…
