Powerful Planning Skills or The Future of the Space Industry

Powerful Planning Skills: Envisioning the Future and Making It Happen

Author: Peter Capezio

Powerful Planning Skills is an easy-to-read guide to the planning skills that can make a huge difference in your personal productivity and in the performance of your entire organization. This book can change the way you evaluate projects and problems. It can help you master the increasingly essential art of increasing productivity and doing it with fewer resources and much less time.

Foreword - Vicki Gervickas

An anonymous quote opens this book and succinctly summarizes why Powerful Planning Skills will prove useful: "To do great, two things are necessary: a plan and not quite enough time." This book is for those who suffer from the latter because they don't have the former, which allows for a large potential audience. A great deal of information is packed into short, punchy chapters. Like most self-improvement books, this one opens with a few chapters that help the reader understand the nature of planning and plans and analyze his or her personal planning style. Readers will recognize themselves as perfectionists, chaotics, referencers or trendsetters. The fourth chapter defines the basics of planning, and outlines an eight-step process for developing a disaster-proof plan. Helpful in this chapter is a case study involving Becky and her work group, who have been charged with seeing their department through a certification process. Each stage in their planning is documented, and the author uses the case study to point out the most common planning mistakes. The next several chapters provide tools for critiquing a plan as well as planning for chaos and change. An overview of commonly used business tools, such as Gantt charts, Pareto analyses and flowcharts, finishes the text. Exercises, case studies and sample plans are used throughout to illustrate the concepts. Capezio rightly points out that people seldom receive praise for their planning skills; it is only the lack of these skills that draws attention. For thoselooking to convert a weakness to a strength, this book can provide a quick antidote to the lack-of-planning-skills blues.

See also: Barguments or Joy of Pickling

The Future of the Space Industry: Private Enterprise and Public Policy

Author: Roger Handberg

The space industry is entering a new era of expanded freedom of opportunity to compete unencumbered by government agendas. This freedom carries a price. The political subsidy culture of the past is dying, so failure is not only possible, but likely for the unprepared and inefficient. For more casual observers, the overview of the currents in space commerce history will be invaluable in identifying space-related economic opportunities and will enable those more experienced in the field to reevaluate their future.

Booknews

Now that the Cold War is over, a space policy and law expert looks at the changes that are coming in space commercialization. He traces the history of space commerce from the pre-Sputnik era to the 1990s and offers an optimistic analysis of the long-range prospects for successful private enterprise in space. He views problems of the public sector--such as falling budgets and heightened scrutiny of government activity--as windows of opportunity for space-industry corporations and entrepreneurs willing to break their dependency on federal subsidies. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Table of Contents:

	Illustrations
	List of Acronyms
	Foreword
	Acknowledgments
Ch. 1	Introduction: Prospects for Private Enterprise Building on the Past	1
Ch. 2	The Dark Side of Space Enterprise	25
Ch. 3	Recasting the Space Social Contract	43
Ch. 4	The Failure of Privatization: The Lessons from Landsat	55
Ch. 5	The Implications for the Internationalization of Space	69
Ch. 6	The Implications for the U.S. Aerospace Industry	83
Ch. 7	Reinventing NASA	95
Ch. 8	The Commercial Development of Space: Implications and Trends	111
Ch. 9	The Bright Side of Space Enterprise: Opportunities	129
Ch. 10	Peering into the Future	153
	Selected References	161
	Index	165