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How to Fail Well

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Current physician and former NASA astronaut Scott Parazynski knows a thing or two about out-of-this-world success. He knows that, most of all, that working with people that differ from you can open you up to new ideas. And new paths forward. Scott's latest book is The Sky Below: A True Story of Summits, Space, and Speed, and he is brought to you today by Amway. Amway believes that ​diversity and inclusion ​are ​essential ​to the ​growth ​and ​prosperity ​of ​today’s ​companies. When woven ​into ​every ​aspect ​of ​the talent ​life ​cycle, companies committed to diversity and inclusion are ​the ​best ​equipped ​to ​innovate, ​improve ​brand image ​and ​drive ​performance.

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SCOTT PARAZYNSKI:

Scott Parazynski traveled over 23 million miles over 5 missions to space, which included 7 spacewalks. He was inducted into the Astronaut Hall of Fame in 2016 and is the only person to both fly into space and summit Mount Everest. Dr. Parazynski served as Senator John Glenn’s personal physician during his historic return to space in 1998, and is the recipient of many prestigious awards, including five NASA Space Flight Medals, two NASA Distinguished Service Medals, two NASA Exceptional Service Medals, the Aviation Week Laureate Award, the Antarctica Service Medal, the National Eagle Scout Association’s Outstanding Eagle Scout Award, and the Lowell Thomas Award from the Explorers Club.

Now a tech start-up CEO and a prolific inventor, he ventures into some of the world’s most extreme environments in the name of exploration and innovation. Scott and his wife, Meena Wadhwa, a renowned planetary scientist, divide their time between Houston, Texas, and Phoenix, Arizona. His most important role to date is serving as a doting husband and father of two children. Scott Parazynski is the author of The Sky Below: A True Story of Summits, Space and, Speed.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Scott Parazynski: I guess the best advice that I could give to creating really successful teams is to constitute them with people that don’t think like you, don’t look like you, don’t come from the same place as you, have different educational backgrounds, different cultures.

The more diversity we can create in a team the better, because you don’t really know where your blind spots are.

So that’s one of the most successful strategies that I’ve used and I would recommend to you.

Situationally appropriate leadership is kind of the mainstay of the success that I’ve seen on all of my space shuttle missions. It’s not always the person that has the title that has the knowledge or the situational awareness to make the critical decision.

Many times in a normal flow of activities you can work by consensus, but there are times when a leader has to lead, and it may not be the person who is designated the commander. It may be the person who has the deepest systems knowledge, it may be the rookie astronaut who has the knowledge or the insight or even just an orthogonal view that everybody else—because they have tunnel vision from their years of experience—that they could not see.

We don’t know what we don’t know, and so I’ve often asked, after working with a team for a while, “How is it going? Am I saying too much, too little? Is the creative spirit of the team working?” And I’ve gotten actually really good feedback in the past, and early on in my career actually I was told, “You really need to talk less.” And actually I paraphrased it—and I discussed in my book—“You need to shut up more,” and that’s a hard thing to hear. But as someone who wants to get the best out of his or her team you really need to listen to everybody around the table, and even if you have “the right answer” immediately sometimes it’s good to sit back and let the junior people speak and really take turns.

Another thing that we’re now spending more time thinking about is the cross-cultural issues. The space program is no longer a U.S.- or a Russian-only domain, but it’s mixing in many cultures, European, Japanese—you have Canadian astronauts and of course Russian cosmonauts flying with us, and there will be other nations flying aboard the International Space Station in the future as well.

So really having a sensitivity, an understanding of those intercultural kinds of issues is really important.

I’ve seen this in other aspects of my life as well. I actually worked as a Chief Technology Officer at a ma...

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