In January, two small spacecraft bounced onto the surface of Mars, delivering rovers that have captivated the world with their stunning photographs of the Martian landscape. By contrast, four years earlier NASA had watched in horror as two successive Mars missions blinked out of existence within a three-month span. Much of the blame for those failures was placed on the agency’s Faster, Better, Cheaper (FBC) initiative, a program established in the early 1990s and designed to transform the way NASA developed unmanned spacecraft. The goal was to drastically reduce project costs while speeding development times. Development was indeed faster, and missions were indeed cheaper—but the approach was flawed, as the doomed 1999 missions suggest. As I talked with NASA managers about the FBC program, I discovered an overarching organizational problem—a learning disability, if you will—that holds lessons for managers in many other environments.
A version of this article appeared in the May 2004 issue of Harvard Business Review.