The Martian dust hadn't been stirred by a craft from Earth in twenty-one years. This time the challenge had come with nearly impossible constraints: go there at a fraction of the cost, do it in a fraction of the time, take risks but don't fail. We were working on a budget less than it would later cost to produce the movie Titanic, but unlike the movie we would need to provide a happy ending.

Our eftort, the Mars Pathfinder mission, has come to define the management approach of Faster, Better, Cheaper.

So begins this roller-coaster ride -- a management book wrapped in a powerful, real-world adventure story. At age forty-one, Brian Muirhead assembled a team that would have to build a spacecraft and land it on Mars for one-twentieth the cost and in half the time of the previous Mars effort twenty years earlier.

Experts who were sure the team could not succeed were stunned on Independence Day 1997, when Pathfinder landed safely on Mars and, aided by its self-propelled, toy-wagon-size rover, Sojourner, began sending back reams of scientific data and thousands of breathtaking color photographs from a rock-strewn terrain under a salmon-colored sky.

In this fast-paced personal account, Muirhead and coauthor William L. Simon explain how the Pathfinder team overcame the odds by discarding the familiar and replacing it with imaginative new technology, a highly unusual organizational structure, and a score of innovative business solutions ranging from the geography of the workplace to ways of speeding up procurement to an intuitive style of decision making on the run.

A chronicle of personal struggles and sacrifices that led to a historic triumph of space exploration, High Velocity Leadership provides powerful guidance on how Faster, Better, Cheaper can be put to work in your own organization.