After graduating from
HBS
at the top of his class, Riesenfeld turned down an attractive offer from Google in order to start Tel Aviv–based Eyeview.
Earlier, Riesenfeld had made it through one of the most selective recruitment and training programs in the Israeli army.
While he was at
HBS
, Riesenfeld studied a case that compared the lessons of the
Apollo 13
and
Columbia
space shuttle crises.
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The 2003
Columbia
mission has a special resonance for Israelis. One of its crew members—air force colonel Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli astronaut—was
killed when
Columbia
disintegrated. But Ramon had been an Israeli hero long before. He was a pilot in the daring 1981 air force mission that destroyed
Iraq’s nuclear facility, Osirak.
HBS
professors Amy Edmondson, Michael Roberto, and Richard Bohmer spent two years researching and comparing the
Apollo
and
Columbia
crises. They produced a study that became the basis for one of Riesenfeld’s classes, analyzing the lessons learned from a
business-management perspective. When Riesenfeld first read the
HBS
case, in 2008, the issues it presented were immediately familiar to the ex-commando. But why had Riesenfeld mentioned the
case to us? What was the connection to Israel, or to its innovation economy?
The
Apollo 13
crisis occurred on April 15, 1970, when the spaceship had traveled three-fourths of the way to the moon. It was less than
a year after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had stepped off
Apollo 11
.
NASA
was riding high. But when
Apollo 13
was two days into its mission, traveling two thousand miles per hour, one of its primary oxygen tanks exploded. This led
astronaut John Swigert to utter what has by now become a famous line: “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”
The flight director, Gene Kranz, was in charge of managing the mission—and the crisis—from the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
He was immediately presented with rapidly worsening readouts. First he was informed that the crew had enough oxygen for eighteen
minutes; a moment later that was revised to seven minutes; then it became four minutes. Things were spiraling out of control.
After consulting several
NASA
teams, Kranz told the astronauts to move into the smaller lunar extension module, which was designed to detach from
Apollo
for short subtrips in space. The extension module had its own small supply of oxygen and electricity. Kranz later recalled
that he had to figure out a way to “stretch previous resources, barely enough for two men for two days, to support three men
for four days.”
Kranz then directed a group of teams in Houston to lock themselves in a room until they could diagnose the oxygen problem
and come up with ways to get the astronauts back into
Apollo
and then home. This was not the first time these teams had met. Kranz had assembled them months in advance, in myriad configurations,
and practice drills each day had gotten them used to responding to random emergencies of all shapes and sizes. He was obsessed
with maximizing interaction not only within teams but between teams and NASA’s outside contractors. He made sure that they
were all in proximity during training, even if it meant circumventing civil service rules barring contractors from working
full-time on the
NASA
premises. Kranz did not want there to be any lack of familiarity between team members who one day might have to deal with
a crisis together.
Three days into the crisis, Kranz and his teams had managed to figure out creative ways to get
Apollo
back to earth while consuming a fraction of the power that would typically be needed. As the
New York Times
editorialized, the crisis would have been fatal had it not been for the “
NASA
network whose teams of experts performed miracles of emergency improvisation.”
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It was an incredible feat and a riveting story.
But
, we asked Riesenfeld,
what’s the connection to Israel?
Fast-forward to February 1, 2003, he told us, sixteen days into the
Columbia
mission, when the space shuttle exploded into pieces as it reentered the earth’s atmosphere. We now know that a piece of
insulating foam—weighing 1.67 pounds—had broken off the external fuel tank during takeoff. The foam struck the leading edge
of the shuttle’s left wing, making a hole that would later allow superheated gases to rip through the wing’s interior.
There were over two weeks of flight time between takeoff—when the foam had first struck the wing—and the explosion. Could
something have been done during this window to repair
Columbia
?
After reading the
HBS
study, Riesenfeld certainly thought so. He pointed to the handful of midlevel
NASA
engineers whose voices had gone unheard. As they watched on video monitors during a postlaunch review session, these engineers
saw the foam dislodge. They immediately notified NASA’s managers. But they were told that the foam “issue” was nothing new—foam
dislodgments had damaged shuttles in previous launches and there had never been an accident. It was just a maintenance problem.
Onward
.
The engineers tried to push back. This broken piece of foam was “the largest ever,” they said. They requested that U.S. satellites—already
in orbit—be dispatched to take additional photos of the punctured wing. Unfortunately, the engineers were overruled again.
Management would not even acquiesce to their secondary request to have the astronauts conduct a spacewalk to assess the damage
and try to repair it in advance of their return to earth.
NASA
had seen foam dislodgments before; since they hadn’t caused problems in the past, they should be treated as routine, management
ruled; no further discussion was necessary. The engineers were all but told to go away.
This was the part of the
HBS
study that Riesenfeld focused on. The study’s authors explained that organizations were structured under one of two models:
a standardized model, where routine and systems govern everything, including strict compliance with timelines and budgets,
or an experimental model, where every day, every exercise, and every piece of new information is evaluated and debated in
a culture that resembles an R&D laboratory.
During the
Columbia
era, NASA’s culture was one of adherence to routines and standards. Management tried to shoehorn every new piece of data
into an inflexible system—what Roberta Wohlstetter, a military intelligence analyst, describes as our “stubborn attachment
to existing beliefs.”
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It’s a problem she has encountered in the world of intelligence analysis, too, where there is often a failure of imagination
when assessing the behavior of enemies.
NASA’s transformation from the
Apollo
culture of exploration to the
Columbia
culture of rigid standardization began in the 1970s, when the space agency requested congressional funding for the new shuttle
program. The shuttle had been promoted as a reusable spacecraft that would dramatically reduce the cost of space travel. President
Nixon said at the time that the program would “revolutionize transportation into near space, by routinizing it.” It was projected
that the shuttle would conduct an unprecedented fifty missions each year. Former air force secretary Sheila Widnall, who was
a member of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, later said that
NASA
pitched
Columbia
as “a 747 that you could simply land and turn around and operate again.”
But as the
HBS
professors point out, “space travel, much like technological innovation, is a fundamentally experimental endeavor and should
be managed that way. Each new flight should be an important test and source of data, rather than a routine application of
past practices.” Which is why Riesenfeld directed us to the study. Israeli war-fighting is also an “experimental endeavor,”
as we saw in the story of Israel’s handling of the Saggers in 1973. The Israeli military and Israeli start-ups in many ways
live by the
Apollo
culture, he told us.
Connected to this
Apollo
culture, certainly in Nava Swersky Sofer’s estimation, is a can-do, responsible attitude that Israelis refer to as
rosh gadol
. In the Israeli army, soldiers are divided into those who think with a
rosh gadol
—literally, a “big head”—and those who operate with a
rosh katan
, or “little head.”
Rosh katan
behavior, which is shunned, means interpreting orders as narrowly as possible to avoid taking on responsibility or extra
work.
Rosh gadol
thinking means following orders but doing so in the best possible way, using judgment, and investing whatever effort is necessary.
It emphasizes improvisation over discipline, and
challenging the chief
over respect for hierarchy. Indeed, “challenge the chief” is an injunction issued to junior Israeli soldiers, one that comes
directly from a postwar military commission that we’ll look at later. But everything about Singapore runs counter to a
rosh gadol
mentality.
Spend time in Singapore and it’s immediately obvious that it is tidy. Extremely tidy. Perfectly manicured green lawns and
lush trees are framed by a skyline of majestic new skyscrapers. Global financial institutions’ outposts can be found on nearly
every corner. The streets are free of trash; even innocuous litter is hard to spot. Singaporeans are specifically instructed
on how to be polite, how to be less contentious and noisy, and not to chew gum in public.
Tidiness extends to the government, too. Lee Kuan Yew’s People’s Action Party has basically been in uninterrupted power since
Singaporean independence. This is just the way Lee wants it. He has always believed that a vibrant political opposition would
undermine his vision for an orderly and efficient Singapore. Public dissent has been discouraged, if not suppressed outright.
This attitude is taken for granted in Singapore, but in Israel it’s foreign.
Israeli air force pilot Yuval Dotan is also a graduate of Harvard Business School. When it comes to “
Apollo
vs.
Columbia
,” he believes that had NASA stuck to its exploratory roots, foam strikes would have been identified and seriously debated
at the daily “debrief.” In Israel’s elite military units, each day is an experiment. And each day ends with a grueling session
whereby everyone in the unit—of all ranks—sits down to deconstruct the day, no matter what else is happening on the battlefield
or around the world. “The debrief is as important as the drill or live battle,” he told us. Each flight exercise, simulation,
and real operation is treated like laboratory work “to be examined and reexamined, and reexamined again, open to new information,
and subjected to rich—and heated—debate. That’s how we are trained.”
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In these group debriefs, emphasis is put not only on unrestrained candor but on self-criticism as a means of having everyone—peers,
subordinates, and superiors—learn from every mistake. “It’s usually ninety minutes. It’s with everybody. It’s very personal.
It’s a very tough experience,” Dotan said, recalling the most sweat-inducing debriefings of his military career. “The guys
that got ‘killed’ [in the simulations], for them it’s very tough. But for those who survive a battle—even a daily training
exercise—the next-toughest part is the debriefing.”
Dotan was an
IAF
formation commander flying F-16 fighter jets. “The way you communicate and deconstruct a disagreement between differing perspectives
on an event or decision is a big part of our military culture. So much so that debriefing is an art that you get graded on.
In flight school and all the way through the squadron . . . there are numerous questions regarding a person’s ability to debrief
himself and to debrief others.”
Explaining away a bad decision is unacceptable. “Defending stuff that you’ve done is just not popular. If you screwed up,
your job is to show the lessons you’ve learned. Nobody learns from someone who is being defensive.”
Nor is the purpose of debriefings simply to admit mistakes. Rather, the effect of the debriefing system is that pilots learn
that mistakes are acceptable, provided they are used as opportunities to improve individual and group performance. This emphasis
on useful, applicable lessons over creating new formal doctrines is typical of the
IDF
. The entire Israeli military tradition is to be tradition
less
. Commanders and soldiers are not to become wedded to any idea or solution just because it worked in the past.
The seeds of this feisty culture go back to the state’s founding generation. In 1948, the Israeli army did not have any traditions,
protocols, or doctrines of its own; nor did it import institutions from the British, whose military was in Palestine before
Israel’s independence. According to military historian Edward Luttwak, Israel’s was unlike all postcolonial armies in this
way. “Created in the midst of war out of an underground militia, many of whose men had been trained in cellars with wooden
pistols, the Israeli army has evolved very rapidly under the relentless pressure of bitter and protracted conflict. Instead
of the quiet acceptance of doctrine and tradition, witnessed in the case of most other armies, the growth of the Israeli army
has been marked by a turmoil of innovation, controversy, and debate.”
Furthermore, after each of its wars, the
IDF
engaged in far-reaching structural reforms based on the same process of rigorous debate.
While the army was still demobilizing after the 1948 War of Independence, Ben-Gurion appointed a British-trained officer named
Haim Laskov to examine the structure of the
IDF
. Laskov was given a blank check to restructure the army from the ground up. “While such a total appraisal would not be surprising
after a defeat,” Luttwak explained to us, “the Israelis were able to innovate even after victory. The new was not always better
than the old, but the flow of fresh ideas at least prevented the ossification of the military mind, which is so often the
ultimate penalty of victory and the cause of future defeat.”
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