​​​​Christopher Sopko

It should go without saying that success in business is greatly impacted by our ability to effectively communicate.  Without effective communication we cannot convey our goals, sell our products or coach our internal teams. 

It is important for eveyrone in an organization to understand the dramatic importance of “effective” communication both internally and externally; and to recognize that what happens in business on a day to day basis is often something entirely different.

A perfect example of less than perfect communication was posted on the CNN website:

(CNN) -- NASA lost a $125 million Mars orbiter because a Lockheed Martin engineering team used English units of measurement while the agency's team used the more conventional metric system for a key spacecraft operation, according to a review finding released Thursday.

The units mismatch prevented navigation information from transferring between the Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft team in at Lockheed Martin in Denver and the flight team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Lockheed Martin helped build, develop and operate the spacecraft for NASA. Its engineers provided navigation commands for Climate Orbiter's thrusters in English units although NASA has been using the metric system predominantly since at least 1990.

No one is pointing fingers at Lockheed Martin, said Tom Gavin, the JPL administrator to whom all project managers report.

"This is an end-to-end process problem," he said. "A single error like this should not have caused the loss of Climate Orbiter. Something went wrong in our system processes in checks and balances that we have that should have caught this and fixed it."

That’s right…poor communication cost NASA a $125 million dollar Mars orbiter!