A golden opportunity awaits Sean O’Keefe. With the Gehman Board report so forcefully emphasizing the organizational cultural and communications problems within NASA, he now has a mandate to exercise decisive leadership to make substantive, crucial changes within the agency.

Right now virtually everyone outside of NASA is in a stone-throwing mode. Very natural, I suppose, but also not particularly helpful in moving the agency forward. I don’t want to add to that fusillade but wish to offer a few pertinent, hopefully constructive thoughts I haven’t yet seen expressed in public forums.

NASA is far from a monolithic, one-culture entity, so it’s specious and simplistic to just say, “fix NASA culture.” Having worked at three different NASA centers, including nine years in the astronaut corps and on the space-shuttle ground processing team at Kennedy Space Center, I’ve seen much more of these cultural variations than most folks. And now in my work with companies from small space start-ups to Fortune 500 corporations, I’ve observed and can state unequivocally that many NASA operations are world-class, executed as well as could be done by any organization. Typically, these positive examples come from the hands-on, real-world portions of NASA where personnel deal virtually exclusively with objective reality: executing procedures, preparing hardware and completing missions brilliantly, often in spite of incredible hurdles posed by bureaucracy, lack of resources and politics.

In general, KSC operations exemplify this very positive culture and results-oriented approach. It’s noteworthy to consider that, with all of the thousands of critical things that could go wrong due to the equipment not being prepared properly at KSC, neither Challenger nor Columbia were the result of vehicle processing errors. Instead, both those $2 billion vehicles and their priceless crews were lost from design and program-level management shortfalls originating at the less hands-on NASA centers — the “view-graph” crowd versus the hardware folks.

Working with enlightened leaders in different organizations, I see that the most progressive ones constantly question themselves, always look outward for new ideas, relentlessly strive to improve, and effectively lead and motivate their people to do the same.

Unlike the best-run companies, perhaps because what NASA does is so unique and it doesn’t operate in the competitive marketplace, or maybe because it is such a mature bureaucracy, our space agency tends to be far too insular.

Particularly on the “view-graph” side, a strong “not invented here” mentality often exists. Overall, such insularity makes for many missed opportunities to benchmark and learn from world-class outfits on the outside. Without that “diligent diagnostic discontent” — which causes forward-looking organizations to question everything, never give in to complacency, and reward those creative people who push for positive change — the natural consequences include communications miscues, cultural weaknesses, even destructive divisiveness and substantial morale problems.

Colin Powell calls leadership “the art of accomplishing more than the science of management says is possible.” O’Keefe’s key task now should be to move beyond the consummate manager he is to show he can accomplish the very challenging but doable task of completely reinvigorating true leadership at every level in NASA:

Work down from your level, Mr. O’Keefe, to identify your standup people at each successive level and uncompromisingly require they also incorporate into their science, engineering and management work timeless and proven leadership and communications principles. Purge the naysayers, politickers and bureaucratic bumblers. Improve the agency through benchmarking with other world-class organizations in both the private and public sectors. Melt away any perceived fear of speaking up through absolute insistence that everyone regularly offer constructive, imaginative, forward-leaning ideas.

As you set the right tone and move beyond a certain negative legacy left by your predecessor, you can develop magnificent leadership artistry at every level. It has been too dormant for too long in too many quarters of NASA. Now is the time to lead with the vision required to more effectively unleash the pent-up potential of some of the greatest and most dedicated talent on or off the planet.

All the best meeting that challenge.