Friendly Rivalries’ and the Winner SpaceX

You have heard me recommend internal friendly rivalries. Here’s one for the record books!  On the final NASA Space Shuttle mission, Atlantis, on July 8, 2011, to the International Space Station.  NASA astronauts left a United States flag to be retrieved by the next group of astronauts to arrive from American soil.  The friendly competition was between Boeing and SpaceX.  On June 1, 2020, nearly nine years later, a NASA team of astronauts captured the flag when they arrived aboard SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft!

SpaceX was new to the scene and often thought of as a joke.  When NASA awarded the $6.8 billion contracts for manned space flight, Boeing received the most significant share $4.2 billion share and SpaceX a mere $2.6 billion.  SpaceX used the “slight” as a rallying cry; they had to be scrappy with the finds awarded and focused their energy on the challenge!  Now they are seen as a significant leader and disrupter of the Space Industry.

How does your organization cultivate internal friendly rivalries?