“Without this, we would never have semiconductor memory in Space.”
… It must have been 1983 or so… I was the prime researcher on an IRAD (Independent Research and Development) project, and realized that without this, we would never have semiconductor memory in Space. I convinced my boss to let me go to the NASA library for a week to dive into the physics and people and that is how it all came together – in the Johnson Space Center (JSC) Library.
…the answer that lives in someone else’s building…
Somewhere in your company, or 2 buildings over, or at a competitor, someone has already solved half of your problem. You have never met them. Their name keeps turning up in the footnotes, in the vendor deck, in the post-mortem from 3 years ago. You keep trying to solve it with the people already in the room.
It is the engineer’s instinct, and I have it too: if I read enough, I can work it out myself. Sometimes you can. But the hard problems usually sit in the Space between 3 teams who do not talk to each other, and no amount of reading on your own closes that gap. Reading tells you who to call. It does not make the call.
…the last partner to join…
Will Champion was the last of the 4 to join Coldplay, in January 1998. The others came to his house because his roommate owned a drum kit and could play it, and the roommate never showed. Will, by his own account, “just said I’d give it a go.” He was studying anthropology, the study of people, and he has been the drummer ever since. Chris Martin says the 4 of them split the songwriting money equally, “whatever the song is.” Nearly 30 years on, it is the same 4 partners. On Music of the Spheres, Champion put the album’s spirit this way: “trying to get rid of all those barriers we put up between us and other people.”
The breakthrough is rarely in your building. It is in the Space between the people you have not called yet.
…to partner is to go and find them…
To partner is to bring together people who need each other and do not know it yet. It is the most underrated skill a technical leader has, and the one nobody trains for. It starts with homework: read what they wrote, learn what they care about, and show up knowing their work better than they expect you to.
The roadblock is waiting to be introduced. Nobody is coming to introduce you. The physicist in the other lab, the experimenter at the contractor, the program manager at the customer… they all have full inboxes, and they all answer the person who has clearly read their work. A good partner arrives with the homework done.
…a song in 2 languages, from 2 bands…
My Universe started, as Chris Martin tells it, with a message from a friend: BTS wanted to do a song with Coldplay. “I said, ‘How would that work?'” It came out on September 24, 2021, sung in English and Korean, and debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, the first song by 2 co-billed groups ever to top that chart. BTS had covered Fix You earlier that year, which is how the talk of working together began.
In the album’s made-up solar system, the song is a planet called Epiphane. Its video puts Coldplay, BTS and an imaginary alien band on 3 different planets. 2 bands, 2 languages, 1 song, because somebody made the first call.
…the week I went to the library to find my partners…
At this point, all Space computers used Magnetic Core memory. To provide more computing, we needed to reduce weight and power… and use semiconductor memory – chips that you now hear about regularly. A PhD in our part of IBM had already said “It will never work” … words that a 23 year old loves to hear 😉 From the years of debate, I knew a week in the library would help me find the path forward…
… there was an experiment that NASA had flown, flying memory that was already hardened. Another person at the Naval Research Lab (NRL) that had a model to predict how much memory would flip from Cosmic Rays. And an experimenter at The Aerospace Corporation (an Air Force Contractor) could run tests on the ground. We needed to change the design to fly soft chips, build the hardware and get the NASA point of contact to agree to all of this. I was the person with the background in Physics, Engineering, and now leadership to pull everyone together…
… it is still one of the highlights of my life. I used everything I had ever learned – math, engineering, physics, sales, leadership… and we did it. It flew, we measured the results in the Berkely Cyclotron, and the numbers all matched the model – within a factor of 2. Unheard of… but enough for me to learn some hard lessons about rubbing people’s face in it… more about that later this week 😉
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: Read for 1 hour what the people you need to win over have written, then call the person whose name keeps turning up.
If you know who you need but not how to open the door, let’s work out how to partner with them. Schedule time with me here.
Make the call, and let the circle grow into… My Universe
