For COLLABORATE 12 on Monday, April 23rd, 2012, Our keynote today was delivered by Captain Mark Kelly, Commander of the Space Shuttle Endeavour’s Final Mission and along with his wife Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, co-author of the new book, Gabby: A Story of Courage and Hope available through Simon & Schuster publishing.

“IOUG Podcast 23-APR-2012: COLLABORATE 2012 Edition 1”

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Transcripting Captain Kelly’s words to us this morning on qualities of leadership and dealing with the never-ending changes we face in daily life, he emphasizes the following:

There is never an excuse for not having timely and accurate communication with the people you work with.

None of us is as dumb as all of us. What that means is that sometimes you can have a team of people, and their job is to make a decision about something, and that team will march off and make a decision and yet every single individual on that team thinks it’s not the right decision, yet they don’t say anything.

In any group like that, you need to ask the most junior person in the group what they think. Because if you ask the managers and leaders first, you often don’t get the real opinions from the junior people after that.

As commander of his space shuttle teams, he required all of his crewmembers to learn to question his decisions. He tells them this before the start of training and then reminds them before they go into space.  Kelly says, “Question all my critical decisions I’m making, and pay attention to all of the details, all of the time.”  He says to learn to like risk-takers.  Appreciate people who are going lean forward and make stuff happen.  He especially likes people who are more comfortable asking for forgiveness than permission.

Be sure to incorporate people who can anticipate – people who think about what is that next bad thing that can happen. People like that can be invaluable to organizations like yours, as they are to the space program.

What he learned most from his beloved wife Gabby, was to deny the acceptance of failure. She demonstrates the principle of never giving up in the face of adversity. She has demonstrated to him the power of the perseverance of the human spirit time and time again with her daily efforts. She has also taught him the value of having constant gratitude and acceptance of others differences and take them as challenges to improve yourself daily.

You can listen to more interviews with Captain Kelly and his wife Gabby, and purchase the print, audio and e-book editions of the book as well at simonandschuster.com

Finally, there’s still time to register for IOUG ‘s Plug-In to Vegas the virtual Collaborate experience. Visit our website and click on the banners for IOUG ‘s Plug-In to Vegas to join us online at Collaborate this week!