Leadership Notes #60
Interview with Legendary Astronaut and former NASA Chief together with the Founder of Inter Astra Institute
Charles Bolden piloted the Space Shuttle mission that deployed the Hubble Space Telescope and served as NASA’s 12th Administrator from 2009 to 2017, leading the agency through a period of significant transformation and innovation.
Ché Bolden, after 26 years of service in the U.S. Marine Corps, is the CEO and Executive Chair of Bolden Group, a private space agency, and the Founder and Board Chair of the Inter Astra Institute.
A condensed transcript of Charles and Ché Bolden’s appearance at PGLF at CIED Georgetown’s Virtual Author Series
Potolicchio: Any advice from the Bolden family for how we can connect more closely with people? How can we have the type of strong relationships that your family has had with others?
Charles Bolden: I come from a family of educators. My mom and dad, as well as my mother and father-in-law, all four of them were educators and they had a love of kids that got passed down to my wife and I.
My parents taught me everything I needed to know about decency and ethics and everything else, at the dinner table, growing up in the segregated South, in the Jim Crow South, in Columbia, South Carolina. My mom was very active in the civil rights movement, she was a part of a group called the “South Carolina Human Relations Council” that tried very hard and, in fact, avoided a lot of the violence that we saw across the South because it had a group of mostly women, white and black, who came together to try to help cooler heads prevail. It's inbred in me from my mom and dad.
Ché Bolden: Just to add to that, the simplest thing that I took from my parents was that if someone has given you the gift of their time, the least you can do is return it and pay attention.
Potolicchio: The first question is cinematic. I want you all to paint a scene that would open up a biography for the other. If I'm thinking about you, Ché, maybe it's Brian Cavanaugh talking about you after 26 years in the Marines, saying that “It's rare to come across someone superior in all of our values as Marines. Ché is an excellent moral, mental, and physical warrior in all respects.”
If it's Charlie, you put a little breadcrumb out once to me whether or not, Strom Thurmond, according to your mom, may have been somebody who lobbied for you to get into the Naval Academy. You got a signed letter from the segregationist senator, when you became the first black class president of the Naval Academy, or when you became NASA administrator.
What would the opening scene be for a movie based on the life of the other Bolden?
Charles Bolden: For Ché, it would be easy, because it is the story of his life. When he was a student in 1988, he walked in and said, “I'm going to apply to the Naval Academy.” I looked at him and said, “Ché, forget it, it's too late, the deadline is the 1st of November, we're already in October. You have to get a physical and all kinds of stuff. You've got to get letters of recommendation, you can't do that.”
He listened to me rail on, then he looked at me and said: “I'm not asking permission, I'm just telling you what I'm going to do.” He continues to be the same way today and I'm very proud of that.
Ché Bolden: Put another way, I'm headstrong. There's a very hectic and chaotic operations center and there's some massive catastrophe that's coming towards the Earth. There's one guy in the middle of it all, just running around and integrating with people and asking what they need and everything. There's an observer there and says, “Who the heck is that guy?” And I go, “He's the boss!”, because that's what my dad has always done. He's never been perceived as the boss or the guy in charge.
He is someone that's in there as integrated as humanely possible, and knows the team so well. He's able to get down there and talk to them at any level. People are always surprised that someone who's achieved what he's achieved is able to remain so grounded and keep his feet so firmly planted.
Potolicchio: We're transitioning now to “The Overview Effect”, but first, I want to read some quotations from a novel by Samantha Harvey, “The Orbital”. What is “The Overview Effect” and then, specifically, how you think, particularly in your leadership training, the overview effect can make us better leaders?
Here's Samantha Harvey: “The earth, from here, is like heaven. It flows with color. A burst of hopeful color. When we’re on that planet we look up and think heaven is elsewhere, but here is what the astronauts and cosmonauts sometimes think: maybe all of us born to it have already died and are in an afterlife. If we must go to an improbable, hard-to-believe-in place when we die, that glassy, distant orb with its beautiful lonely light shows could well be it. Continents and countries come one after the other and the earth feels not small, but almost endlessly connected. An epic poem of flowing verses.” Charlie, before you went to space, you actually took classes and did lots of research on African topography. Can you talk about that moment, just minutes after takeoff when you looked at Earth from space?
Charles Bolden: Being of African descent, when I passed over the continent of Africa, I wanted to be able to look at some of the countries from which I potentially could have come, mostly the countries on the west coast of Africa. I'm embarrassed when I tell the story because, for some reason, I thought I was going to look out the window, down on the continent and see all these lines, the countries nicely delineated, and it would be easy for me to see Sierra Leone and Nigeria and West Africa and everything else.
It was about 15 minutes into flight and we had launched from the Kennedy Space Center, we're going 17,500 miles an hour, so over around Earth once every 90 minutes, over about 45 miles a second. I saw the British Isles below, which I recognized, but I looked up ahead and I saw what I thought was a big island. It turned out to be the continent of Africa, this place that I had studied. In that brief period of time, maybe 10 minutes, in traversing the continent of Africa, I looked down and I wept. I literally cried, one, because I was seeing my homeland, but the other thing was because there were no boundaries, no borders, no demarcations to separate people.
You had the beautiful Mediterranean coast and then you went into the Sahara Desert, but just one giant landmass, full of people. I realized that everything I had learned in my life, I was 39 years old at the time, always talked about how different we are and how our skin and language make us different.
Looking out the window, I realized that no, that's the way God created this planet: all one and we have divided it. We can undivide it if we choose to, just the same way that we chose for various reasons, economic and political, to make people feel like they're all different. I was just blown away by that.
Potolicchio: Ché, first of all, what is “The Overview Effect”? As a premier leadership trainer yourself, how are you going to use that to take leaders to the next level?
Ché Bolden: The concept appeared when we started sending people out of Earth's orbit and into the stars. Until 1987 or so, who I consider a good friend now, Frank White, took the time to write about it in his book, “The Overview Effect”.
There were these experiences that astronauts had, that they came back, explained to people and tried to put into words something that was, at that point, never been spoken of. I applaud Frank for putting it on paper and for all the work he's continued to do with it. The way that translates to the rest of us is not everybody's going to get to leave the Earth. Out of the 8 billion people on the planet Earth, less than 700 have ever gone into microgravity.
It’s a long way for a lot of us to go. However, my parents took the time to make sure my sister and I knew more than what was just in our little world around us. Whether that was taking us from Houston, Texas to Columbia, South Carolina or to New York City, they made sure we had a grander picture of the world in which we lived, down in Little Seabrook or Clear Lake, Texas. When I joined the Marine Corps, I started going around the world a little bit more and I started to gain more of a perspective. I married someone who's not from the United States and that further expanded my perspective.
In effect, I was having that very same experience on the terrestrial level, just in a different way. When I look at the world as we have it now, through the lens of my children, of my nephews, I try to think about how we expand their experiences so that they are making far better decisions than we've made with our hedgehog butte.
Potolicchio: I want to talk about talent and I want to read a bit from Adam Grant's book, “Hidden Potential, The Science of Achieving Greater Things”. Charlie, when you were asked by President Obama to be the 12th administrator of NASA, I don't know if you said this jokingly or if it was in all seriousness, but you said, “President Obama, fire me after year one if Sasha and Malia are not interested in science”. You became the third longest NASA administrator in history, serving two terms. Part of President Obama's desire to really focus on NASA was to inspire the next generation in this idea of exploration.
This is Adam Grant: “When I wanted to find out how to identify hidden potential, I knew NASA was an ideal organization to study. The stakes are sky high. Picking the wrong astronaut could jeopardize a mission and cost crews their lives. That left the agency much more concerned about false positives, accepting the best candidates, than false negatives, rejecting good ones. To understand why we miss potential and how we spot it, I reached out to Dwayne Ross, who led astronaut selection at NASA. With between 2,400 and 3,100 applicants for only 11 to 35 spots, they have to quickly size up who had potential and who didn't.”
This is a twofold question. The first one is how can we earn people's attention when we apply for jobs or when we're looking for an investment and do you have any methodology to figure out who has the talent or who has the potential to do a certain job?
Ché Bolden: The very first thing I tried to teach my kids as they were growing up was to be critical thinkers. That's the number one skill that I use anytime I look at building any team. Who are the critical thinkers? Who are the ones that are not going to accept the status quo just because?
I've had some fits and starts in my life and my dad, my wife, and others can attest to this, where I will push on a boundary just because it needs to be pushed on, because nobody's pushed on it in a while.
However, as destructive as that extreme might be, I encourage people all the time to push back. I think my dad will relay this because I've heard the way he leads and, creating an environment where people are not afraid to fail and, quite frankly, are going to be recognized for the effort as much as they are for the success is something that's really important.
The last thing I would say is, and I don't know whether it's a byproduct of the way Charlie and Jackie Bolden raised me or of me going into the Marine Corps and aviation and watching what they do, but the number one decision maker is “is someone going to lose their life or not?” If that's ever in question, then you've got to think about it a lot. If the answer is no, the rest of the stuff's replaceable.
Charles Bolden: I talk to a lot of kids who think they want to be astronauts. The one thing I tell everybody is my number one rule in life, which is “take care of your people”. Give me some examples of where you have reached out and really taken an interest in what your people do and taken care of them, help promote them as opposed to promoting yourself. If you want to be really good and want to progress, find somebody to take your place. Try to groom people who are going to take your place.
When I was on the selection board in the astronaut office, we weren't looking for people who were technically qualified because we knew they were just by having gone through the initial screening. You could look at their academic records, at their performance on the job, you knew that they were technically qualified, but you didn't know exactly what kind of people they were.
We were really looking to see what you did outside of your job. Did you play sports? Were you active in your church, synagogue, mosque? What did you do in the community? Those are the kinds of things that I looked for and I still look for in people.
Potolicchio: Do either of you have a short heuristic or something that can get quickly to whether or not they have that right stuff? Thomas Edison, when he was trying to figure out if someone was going to come into his lab, he would take them out to lunch and would order them a bowl of soup and put it in front of them. If they immediately put the salt or pepper into the soup, that was it. There was no way they were going to go in the lab because what he was trying to test was experimentation, right? Taste the soup first.
Do either of you have something like that, where you can just figure out the right stuff quickly, particularly given the massive applicants or potential mentees that want to be mentored by you?
Ché Bolden: We've lived a bit of a charmed life. The environments that he and I have entered, where we've had to make decisions about that, a lot of that metric was already done for us.
The United States Marine Corps and dare I say, NASA, has got a pretty high bar to be part of that organization in the first place. We got a head start.
A lot of times, my wife and I have this discussion around socioeconomic status and a lot of times you meet people who were born on third base. When it comes to leadership and people skills, you look particularly in military leaders, seniors, non-commissioned officers, and they're kind of born on two and a half, rounding second base, to get to third base, when it comes to being able to assess people because the decks have been stacked. That being said, the number one thing is “Are they people of integrity?” We're all fallible in that regard. The hope is that you find people that are less fallible than others and just put your trust in them.
Charles Bolden: The question I ask myself is, “Do I want to work for that person?” My predecessors, there were a number of them that I would not have wanted to have worked for. Coming into my position, one of the things I said was “I want to observe what they do.”
I always keep a ledger mentally, and on one side of the ledger are good things that people do, and on the other side of the ledger are bad things that people do. I spend a lot of time on the bad side of the ledger because those are the things that I do not like, do not want to do and the characteristics that I do not want to exhibit. I generally tend to look at the things that people do that are not people friendly. You'll hear me use the term a lot: “somebody is not a people person.” That becomes pretty obvious early on when you're talking to a person and they make it all about themselves.
My mother used to have a saying that “He who tooteth his own horn, his horn will not be tooted.” I hated that term. That was the kind of person that I really wanted to stay away from- the person that all they could talk about was what they did. I understood what my mother meant, but I don't like people who tooteth their own horn all the time.
Potolicchio: I want to read Tom Wolfe's “The Right Stuff”: “In time, the Navy would compile statistics showing that for a career Navy pilot, one who intended to keep flying for 20 years, as Conrad did, there was a 23% probability that he would die in an aircraft accident. This did not even include combat deaths since the military did not classify death in combat as accidental. Furthermore, there was a better than even chance, a 56% probability to be exact, that at some point a career Navy pilot would have to eject from his aircraft and attempt to come down by parachute.”
And then Tom Wolfe talks about “the right stuff”: “As to just what this ineffable quality was, well, it obviously involved bravery, but it was not bravery in the simple sense of being willing to risk your life. That idea seemed to be that any fool could do that. If that was all that was required, just any fool could throw away their life in this process. No, the idea here seemed to be that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurdling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness to pull it back in that last yawning moment and then to go up again the next day and every day after that.”
My question to you is about how do we have courage, especially when it comes to high stakes decisions? How did you potentially develop this ineffable quality of “the right stuff” to be able to handle high stakes decisions, whether or not it's being in Iraq and Afghanistan, exploring space, or the 100 combat missions you had in Vietnam? How do we cultivate this? How can you help us in our own business and day to day lives?
Charles Bolden: People misunderstand the term courage. They always think about exactly what Tom Wolfe was talking about, being willing to stand up and take a bullet or do something really risky. The Marine Corps has this, what we call “our core values”, honor, courage, and commitment.
The courage part to me, it really has to do with doing the right thing, being willing to stand up for people who can't stand up for themselves. Will you accept people who are engaged in sexual or racial or gender or other kinds of harassment? Or will you stand up and say, “In my organization, I don't tolerate that?” That is much more difficult than going out into combat, because you're exposing yourself to the potential of harassment or ostracism because you've spoken out against what may be the culture in the organization in which you live.
In the Marine Corps and the Navy, they are two services in particular that are noted for their bias, although we work really hard all the time to try to overcome that. It's most important for the few of us who happen to be different to be willing to take a stand and say “We're not going to tolerate that kind of behavior.”
That's what I think about when I think about courage. The other thing is if you don't believe in the team with whom you're working, you may as well not go anyway. I never worried about going on a combat mission. I never worried about flying in the shuttle, even after the accident, after losing Challenger, because I really believed in the team, the flight controllers, the mechanics and everybody else. I knew that they were dedicated and focused and I said, “I can't do everything. I've got to depend on somebody to take care of me” and I trusted them.
Ché Bolden: One of the things I've learned recently is that generalizations are always a bad thing, particularly when you generalize people. When you talk about courageous individuals, I think that's a bad thing, because everybody has their moment. There are people who have done courageous things or have performed a courageous act, just as if there are people who have done horrific things or performed horrific acts. It's not absolving either end of the spectrum, but to me, that puts courage in a more understandable frame of mind.
I don't want to trivialize it, I was making light of it earlier, but when you live a good portion of your life where your life is about life or death, I hate to give the credit where the credit is due, but Jeff Bezos' two-way door analogy is appropriate. Is this some place where we can rescind that decision? If it's a place where you can rescind the decision, then the courage that we always attribute to people really isn't there. But if it's a one-way door and you make this decision and there is no coming back, that takes a moment of courage for someone to make that decision.
What I have found in my later years is that the better prepared you are, i.e. the more knowledge you have, not necessarily the skill that you have, but the knowledge you have, the awareness you have, the better you're prepared to make those one-way decisions more efficiently and more quickly. Usually, it hits the press when someone does this because it's one of those high pressure situations where things have got to happen really fast, those folks who seem to be either misinformed or more stupid make the quick decision.
Potolicchio: My final question is about family. One of the most inspiring moments of my teaching career was watching the two of you fireside each other at a Georgetown University in-person event and Ché, watching your youngest daughter who was in the classroom looking at the two of you with this sense of wonder. Charlie, you've been in love with your wife now for 77 years. I was corrected one time when I called you “high school sweethearts” and you said “I fell in love with my wife when I was three years old”.
Almost in some ways to try to channel some of that family magic that you all have had, please, as a father, hopefully one day as a grandfather, as a husband, what are some pointers that I can pick up from the Boldens?
Charles Bolden: Love them unconditionally, number one. I consider myself a person of faith and I'm a practicing Episcopalian. I'm a piss poor one. I don't always live the faith correctly, the way it should be lived. But my priests, both of them, frequently in their sermons, talk about the fact that the love of God for us is not something that we can pick and choose. He's going to love us no matter what. I think that's the way that parents should be, we should love them no matter what.
It doesn't make any difference what they do, Ché is still my son, Kelly is still my daughter. My responsibility to them is to be committed. I go back to those cardinal values of the Navy and the Marine Corps - honor, courage, and commitment. Commitment is a really important one.
Being a parent means you're committed to your family and you're going to do everything you can, everything in your power, to make sure that they stay safe and that they have every advantage that there is. Give them room to grow, turn them loose.
Ché Bolden: I presaged the generalization comment because I have found recently something that has really made me think twice about things. I've been reading Ayn Rand and I don't espouse a good portion of that. For those of you that agree with her, I don't agree with you and those who don't agree with her, I'm not necessarily in disagreement with you.
There's a lot to be said about individualism. I got this from my dad, because he was always very particular about it: “Are you sure you want to do that? You don’t have to do those things!” One of the things that I've always tried to make sure that my daughters, in particular, have paid attention to is that they are their own people and that this is their life to live. That's you, not me.
They have to not be afraid to make their own choices but they have to be prepared for the consequences. That's just part of being a parent, I guess. That's the best I can do.
Potolicchio: John Kellogg is one of those two priests that you mentioned. You've said that he's shared a quote by a Swiss philosopher, which I love. Here's the quote: “Life is short, and we do not have much time to gladden the hearts of those who make the journey with us. So be swift to love, and make haste to be kind.”
Monoșes: If we view space not as merely a domain of competition, but as a reflection of human values, what principles do you think should guide the next era of exploration and commercialization?
Ché Bolden: It has to be for people. The reason why the nonprofit that we started exists is to bring more access and opportunities in the business of space. That's where more people, I mentioned earlier, 700 people have gone to the Earth orbit, you multiply that by a factor of maybe 1,000, probably 10,000 for the number of people who have touched that process.
We've got to make it better and easier for people to get there. Until we have created a cultural feeling where people understand that the business of space is for them, we're going to have people continue to ask the question: “Is there really a place for me?”
Charles Bolden: President Obama had three stipulations for anything, particularly in dealing with other people in other countries. When he sent me to China to assess the feasibility of working with the Chinese in human space flight, he drilled into me that there were three things that they had to be willing to do, otherwise, we couldn’t work with them: reciprocity, trust, and transparency.
If we can't be honest with each other, we probably can't do business, especially in space, where there are very few laws, almost none, so we depend on norms of behavior. I hope no one will take this as political, but one of the risks that we run as a nation today is transparency. I think people confuse blatant talking all the time with transparency, but transparency talks about your intent, as well as your goals, and it requires honesty. Those are absolutely essential if we're going to be successful with commercial space the way that we've drawn it up.