Internal and external analysis later concluded that all these problems stemmed from shortfalls of organizational communication – devastating “interface failures,” or blinks. In his 1964 book The American Challenge, French journalist Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber argued that Europe’s lag behind the United States in the Space Race was not a question of money but of “methods of organization above all . . . this is not a matter of ‘brain power’ in the traditional sense of the term, but of organization, education, and training.” On the other side of the pond, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara concurred that Europe suffered from a managerial deficit: “The technological gap was misnamed.” It was a space age Tower of Babel: the countries’ inability to speak to one another obstructed their joint effort to reach the heavens.
Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams
