The Venture Edge

One of the important skills that entrepreneurs must develop is effective decision making. This is true not only because some of the decisions they are called upon to make could affect their business insignificant ways, but also because entrepreneurs make hundreds of decisions throughout any given day and usually those decisions are made quickly, almost instinctively. Any one of those decisions could negatively affect the business.

Tuesday I had the pleasure of meeting the producer of the documentary film The Triumph of the Dream, Norman Seeff, a medical doctor turned photographer.  In a a visually intimate and compelling style, Seeff explores the human and emotional side of the Mars Exploration mission during which engineers at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) successfully landed two Mars Rovers on the surface of the planet. It turns out that the technical achievements of the mission served merely as the context or backdrop for the very real inner journey experienced by the team members as they struggled to overcome the inertia of previous failures with the Mars Polar Lander mission in 2000.