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Apollo 13 Case Study

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Apollo 13 Case Study
Leadership Theories Analysis using the movie Apollo 13

Vision and Value
Apollo 13 demonstrates the richness of leadership principles and values, especially focusing on team solidity. The movie illustrates how the leaders can develop a vision and values, and how the teams can collaborate under high stress situation.
In the beginning of the movie the vision of the Apollo 13 project was to land the astronaut’s on the surface of moon. But the unexpected explosion in the service module created a “Do or die” situation for the team. The vision of the project is suddenly changed to getting the astronaut’s back on earth safely. NASA had a common goal that was strongly set in the minds of each engineers and they are well aware of the cost of a failure. Even under this tremendous pressure, the team was able to communicate effectively and use different types of decision making techniques in order to solve the problem effectively. The movie shows an enormous team effort to triumph a doubtful result, and everyone has their own role to play.
The mission control team headed by Flight Director Gene Kranz had developed a set of values, like discipline, morale, toughness, competence, commitment and team work to approach this odd scenario. And it was these values that build the chemistry that keeps them together in all the difficulties to reach the success.
Flight Director Gene Kranz organizes the team with his instruction to ‘work the problem’, enabling everyone to play their role in resolving the situation. For every seemingly impossible situation, he given a new energy and vision for the team by his response “we need to find a way to make it work”

Teams and Team Building
The movie shows the pain of team work and what happened during emergency. There are primarily 3 teams in the movie. First one is the mission control center team with Flight Director Gene Kranz. The second one is the Apollo 13 mission team with Commander Jim Lovell and the third one is the team of

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