This is not a review, and I don't hand out stars either. It is part of my annotated reading list. Whatever first comes to mind when I pick up the book. More about it in this blog post.
written on October 28, 2026, read June 2012
“Failure Is Not an Option” is Gene Kranz’s book. Most people will know the name from his role as Flight Director on Apollo 13, but his career extends far beyond that – both before and after. And it includes situations that are no less significant just because it’s harder to make a film about them. The Apollo 1 disaster, for example.1
Speaking of films: I think it is very important that Gene Kranz can be seen on the cover of his book. Otherwise even those who read his book would probably picture him as Ed Harris. And yet my mental image still has traces of Ed Harris in it. It’s the same for me with Chesley Sullenberger: I constantly have to throw Tom Hanks out of the mental picture.
I have read in a number of places that “Failure is not an option” is not a good management tactic, because it puts employees under too much pressure.
At that point I asked myself whether there can be any more pressure than the fact that there are people sitting on top of the rocket. “Failure is not an option” is really just a description of the obvious. And if you deviate from that, if other considerations suddenly become more important than the fact that there are people sitting in this piece of technology – with enormous quantities of chemicals as fuel that are highly explosive in combination – then you get January 28, 1986 – the day of the Challenger disaster.
Failure may be unavoidable. But according to the Duden, Germany’s standard dictionary, an option is a choice (in German) – in other words, something you actively decide on. And I don’t think it’s a bad idea to take precisely the option “failure” off the table and to see failure purely as a consequence – a consequence for which, in turn, you need options to contain its effects.
I don’t think you even need to fire rockets to the Moon for this. In my text about my aortic aneurysm surgery I wrote that I hoped my surgeon would go into the operation with exactly this mindset. You may see that as pressure, but it’s the only way you dare to face something like that as a patient. It’s the only way people will sit on top of a Moon rocket. Or board a plane to Majorca. And if you break it down to the small things in life: no customer invests millions in hardware if you approach the job with the attitude “Meh … good enough … and if not, no big deal”.
There are situations in which failure has no particular consequences. But often it does.
Just as important, I found, were the lessons learned from the Apollo 1 accident, which led to the motto “Tough and Competent”: accept nothing that could pose a risk to the people up there. Here, too, the same applies: if you deviate from that, you get January 28, 1986.
I enjoyed reading the book. What I still regret to this day: if I remember correctly, shortly after I joined Sun, Gene Kranz was the keynote speaker at a large internal Sun conference2 in the USA. I would have loved to be there.3
PS: And yes, “Failure is not an option” isn’t from Gene Kranz. Ed Harris4 says it in the film. And Kranz liked it so much that he adopted it. Which is somehow ironic, considering that Ed Harris keeps sneaking into my mental picture.
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The disaster features, for example, in “First Man” (with Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong). But you simply can’t make a story with a happy ending out of it – unless you want to see the successful Moon landings as one, which were ultimately also based on the lessons learned from this accident. And that is exactly how the disaster is woven into “First Man”. ↩
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I think it was CEC 2003. I myself only attended CEC 2006 in San Francisco – the conference with the legendarily bad coffee. ↩
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Back then, my fear of flying was still in the way. And I still had to earn my stripes first. ↩
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Of course it isn’t his line either, but ultimately that of one of Kranz’s team – Jerry Bostick, who passed away only in December 2025 – who said it in an interview with the filmmakers, who then worked it into the script. ↩