An Out-of-this-World Career Trajectory
Read about Gregory Johnson's, MBA '05, experience piloting the space shuttle Endeavour and how getting his MBA helped him perform better in outer space.
by Sandy Sheehy
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But despite all the novelties of actually being 240 miles above Earth, for Johnson, the most surprising moment of the mission was liftoff, where “the shuttle leaped off the ground like an animal.” And even though he’d seen photos and footage from many missions before his, he wasn’t prepared for the views, which he describes as “so magnificent they were distracting.”
They were views he’d been waiting nearly 40 years to experience himself. In 1969, he was 7 years old, sitting in front of a black and white television at his grandparents’ house in Cairo, Mich., when he saw Neil Armstrong take the first human steps on the moon. From that moment on, he knew he wanted to be an astronaut.
But Johnson was a realist. How many boys with spaceman fantasies ever got a chance? In school, he excelled in math and science. Figuring he’d become an engineer, he graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1984 with honors in aeronautical engineering and received a Guggenheim Fellowship to earn his master’s in flight structural engineering at Columbia University. Growing up with his dad in the Air Force (though as a band leader, not a pilot), Johnson loved planes. Upon graduation from the academy, he received his own commission. Two years later, he was flying some of the fastest, nimblest aircraft taxpayer money could buy. During the 1990s, he flew 34 combat missions in Operation Desert Storm and another 27 in Operation Southern Watch. He earned 13 medals, including the Distinguished Flying Cross.
He also earned his nickname, “Box.” Today’s high-tech fighter jets feature computer screens on which areas prohibited as particularly dangerous are outlined in three-dimensional boxes. Most pilots avoid these. Johnson didn’t. By heading for the box, he displayed a propensity for thinking outside the box.
With his compact build, short-cropped salt-and pepper hair, warm brown eyes and ready, can-do smile, Johnson looks like Hollywood’s image of a top gun. Back from the Middle East in 1991, he attended a NASA Town Hall Meeting, just to learn a little about the space program. One of the presenters suggested that with his fighter-jet experience, he’d be a good candidate for test-pilot school—and that being a test pilot would give him a shot at being chosen as an astronaut. “Fly cool things at Edwards [Air Force Base] and throw your name in the hat,” Brig. General Charlie Bolden suggested. Johnson took the advice.
When he got the call saying he’d been selected for the astronaut training class of 1998, Johnson was in Alabama attending military leadership school, preparing for a desk job. He was elated, but getting accepted into the astronaut training program didn’t mean he’d get to go into space. There were 31 in his class, 44 in the class immediately before his. For seven years, Johnson spent about half his time on training, including flying T-38 jets to keep his pilot skills current, and half on tasks supporting the shuttle program.
“They have various jobs, just like any other organization,” he explains. “You work your way up the food chain. It could be engineering or robotics or supporting the space station.”
Then on Feb. 1, 2003, everything changed. The space shuttle Columbia disintegrated over East Texas, killing all seven astronauts on board. The shuttle program shut down to give the space agency a chance to figure out why. With his master’s degree in flight structural engineering, Johnson was assigned to the investigative team. Initially, they thought a piece of insulating foam dislodged during ascent wouldn’t have the strength to punch through the fuselage. Johnson helped design the test that demonstrated dramatically that it would. “That was an incredible, almost horrifying moment,” he later told the New York Times. “Jaws dropped when it made such a huge hole in the panel.”
At the same time, knowing his studies wouldn’t be interrupted by a shuttle assignment, he enrolled in the Texas Executive MBA program. Getting an MBA had long been a part of Johnson’s career plan. When he retired from the Air Force, he wanted to be a manager, and he wanted to be a good one. He chose McCombs because of its reputation and because he wanted a residency program, with the opportunity to interact with classmates. Austin was close enough to Houston to make that feasible.
Johnson was the first astronaut in McCombs’ EMBA track (originally known as Option II), but participants with unusual occupations are not uncommon. “We’d have nuns sitting next to FBI agents,” says Court Huber, the program’s director from 1991 to 2005. The diversity of backgrounds is no accident, he adds: “The key to an executive MBA is the combination of rigorous, disciplined faculty passionate about their material and students with a depth and wide range of experience who can go back to their organizations and apply the ideas they learn in real time.”
Johnson managed the competing demands of his coursework and the Columbia investigation by getting up at 5 a.m. and putting in a couple of hours of study before heading over to the Johnson Space Center, then hitting the books again at night. It meant less time for his wife and three children, now 10, 13 and 14, and less for job-related thinking after hours. “I had to neglect my family a bit,” he admits. “And I made a little bit of a trade in the pecking order at work.”
Huber remembers Johnson as “an engaged critic of loose thinking” who “took delight in researching whether claims were based on provable data.” When he found a flaw, Johnson pressed back, with high expectations but with good humor.
His fellow students recall his quick grasp of math and statistics, his energy, his positive attitude and his surprising modesty. “We all tried to act like he wasn’t a rock star, but he made it easy,” explains classmate J. J. Mann, who runs a faith-based nonprofit organization in Austin. “Everybody’s wearing their egos on their shoulders, and Box is just a regular guy.”
“The very beautiful thing he brought the class was his presence,” says classmate Vid Desibhatla. “Even before he came to the program, he’d achieved a lot. He was a veteran, he was a fighter pilot, and yet he was down to earth,” Desibhatla added without even a hint of irony.
“He didn’t have that envelope of insecurity around him that most of us do,” Desibhatla says. “I had all this insecurity in me, but within three or four months, I felt much more confidence, just from interacting with him.”
The McCombs program honed Johnson’s approach to problem solving. Pilots, especially fighter and test pilots, tend to react quickly to challenges. Sometimes, their lives depend on making warp-speed decisions. “But in space, you have time to analyze situations. After my MBA, I found that I was better at bringing in all the data,” Johnson says.
“Our purpose is to change the way students think in preparation for their leadership in the future,” explains the program’s director, David Jemison. “The program is designed for mid-career professionals who want to alter the trajectory of their careers in both slope and velocity.”
Johnson also benefited from the mental workout.
“Like any person in your forties, when you go back to graduate school, you tighten up your thinking,” Johnson says. “It was a gymnasium for the brain. I had really bright classmates to bounce ideas off.”
The constant interplay of ideas, question and answers— whether between students and professors or among classmates —is one of the most valuable things Johnson took away from his EMBA experience. In fact, his recent shuttle mission could have been made to order as a test case for the Texas EMBA approach to teamwork. “On a team, you have to be both a leader and a follower,” Johnson says. “Preparing for the flight and while we were in space, I applied many of the organizational tools I learned, including seeing where everyone is coming from.”
Three years after graduating, those classmates are still close by—if not geographically, then spiritually, as evidenced by the large group that traveled to watch the launch. “He’d been working all his life for a 16-day mission, so I felt compelled to be there,” says Mann.
Back on earth, Johnson is working on the NASA manned spaceflight team, applying his engineering skills, his spaceflight experience and the insights and approaches he learned at McCombs. He hopes to fly a future shuttle mission, this time as commander. But the shuttle program is slated to shut down in 2010, at which point he may be ready for a career change. It might be to an industry related to aerospace, as he assumed when he entered the EMBA program. Then again, it might not. He met so many bright people at McCombs, from so many different businesses and organizations, that he’s no longer certain. A whole new world has opened up.
Sandy Sheehy has written two books and numerous articles for national and regional magazines. Her day job is as a major gifts officer for the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.
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