Why SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell Doesn't Play It Safe | Success With Moira Forbes

the launch business is incredibly exciting it is probably one of the most nerve-wracking industries as well there's no question that yesterday's announcement was incredibly exciting i mean that everything that we've been doing at spacex kind of led up to that moment and to think that you know i'll be involved in getting humans to space uh let alone all the way to mars is it's extraordinary you work um for elon musk a very very visionary leader how has he made you do extraordinary work you want to do great work for him he's so visionary and he pushes so hard and i don't mean like every day he's pushing hard it's just the things that he wants to do and the way he wants to drive the company you want to keep up and you don't want to fall behind and so you do great work you're self-motivated to try to achieve the goals that he sets forth what's one thing you've learned from him in in this role think big think big had you always been a big thinker i don't think so i tend to focus on the kind of the here and now and it's really important to solve problems for a longer term i also have learned that he's rarely wrong even if that's super irritating and it feels not right when you first hear what he wants to go achieve and so if it doesn't sound like what you think we should be doing i i always stop and think okay we've been through this before think hard about what he's saying what he's trying to achieve and figure out how to make it work describe the the moment when you got asked to take on the role here as president it's a funny story we were on the tarmac to fly to houston to do final negotiations for the contract where we the operational contract to serve the international space station with cargo he asked on the flight down there should we you know you want to do this and i loved my job at the time so my gut initially for nanosecond was [Music] no i really like my job maybe i'm not finished with that yet and then i said no of course yes i want to do that the launch business is incredibly exciting it is probably one of the most nerve-wracking positions or nerve-racking industries as well you know you have over a million pounds of thrust with the rocket launching is a big moment and critically i'm launching satellites for you know many of the executives that my customers are friends or certainly long-term colleagues and so you really want to make sure that that is not a disappointing moment for them many of your launches have been successful some haven't been which is a nature of of the business describe one of those moments where you know there was that that profound disappointment so it does feel like a gut punch when you see the rocket fall to pieces the three failures we had with falcon one we were really learning how to be a company and how to build rockets at that time so those experiences are not like the falcon 9 issue that we had last june it felt surreal because you know we were on such a role things have been going so well first of all i thought telemetry was wrong my video wasn't working telemetry was wrong and then recognized that it was a failure we lost the vehicle there is kind of an automated mode you go into i picked up the phone i called a number of my customers so you kind of go into a process which is a bit of a nice diversion to just start that process and so when we had our failure again this past september that it was kind of practiced the most important thing is to not look super stressed and super disappointed to you know your employee base i think i did a better job on that last june than this most recent one because the the pressure is enormous right now if you were to to write a letter to yourself of 20 25 years ago what advice would you have loved to know at that point in time in your career it's very important to take risks in your career take jobs that you would never have thought you would ever take that's the way you move forward i don't really play it safe when i look back at the career decisions that i've that i've made i think your first job out of school it's important to think not about the money or the position but think about where you feel like you need growth learning how to be successful at that particular role would be a nice building block a good piece of infrastructure or foundation for your career i would give this advice to anybody but and maybe maybe it's more important for for women and minorities and that is just do great work i believe that you get recognized when you do great work you know don't focus on the fringe bits don't focus on the negative just figure out what you're there to do and do a great job

Channel: ForbesWomen

Views: 88,657

Keywords: Gwynne Shotwell, Moira Forbes, SpaceX, Innovation

Id: ZEH9wzfR-O4

Length: 5min 8sec (308 seconds)

Published: Tue May 18 2021