December 29, 2010 Vol. 3, Issue 12

Members of the current SELDP class spent a half-day at Google’s Mountain View campus as part of a week-long learning event at Ames Research Center in November. The site visit was a leadership benchmarking exercise, in which officials from Google shared about their vision for the organization, approaches to leadership, and efforts to foster creativity and innovation.

SELDP also held a benchmarking event with systems engineers from General Motors (GM) at NASA Headquarters in early December. GM, which is in the process of accelerating its own systems engineering capability, learned about the SELDP program online and contacted NASA. “The more we talked, the more we wanted to share with each other,” said SELDP Director Christine Williams. “They had done a lot of systems engineering benchmarking, which they were willing to share with us.”

NASA and General Motors plan to hold further systems engineering learning events in 2011.